That's all.
]]>Case in point: you could put together an all-star team made up of players from the Pac 10, and I wouldn't seed them any higher than 3, much less the 2 that UCLA received. Of course, I haven't actually seen UCLA play, so that opinion is being pulled straight out of thin air.
You will excuse me, I hope, for GLOATING long and loud over the next couple of days. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that Syracuse and Iowa each would win their conference tournaments--Iowa had a better shot to do so as a 2 seed. Coincidentally, that's the seed they should have received in the NCAAs. I know, I know, you're thinking that I'm just being a homer, but consider this: all weekend long, there was discussion about whether Ohio State deserved a 1 seed. Iowa beat Ohio State both times they played this year--they beat them in Iowa City, yes, but they also beat them on a neutral floor when OSU still had a shot at a #1. Don't get me wrong--I'm happy with a 3, but they deserve a 2. As do Gonzaga and Florida, in my opinion. In fact, Texas is the only 2 I'm satisfied with. I would have moved up 3 of the 3's, and swapped Boston College and North Carolina (the former having beat the latter at NC, and at Greensboro). I think the committee was a little too tied to conference standings in some cases when assigning seeds within conferences. Especially when you consider that, within super-conferences, all teams don't have the same schedule. Body of work, blah blah blah. What it comes down to for me is ranking the better teams higher; I don't really have an issue with the 1s this year, but everything else feels a little wonky to me.
And I'm big enough to admit that Syracuse got overseeded as well--it's hard for me to imagine, even having witnessed their miracle run through the Big East Tournament that they could have gone from an 11 or 12 (assuming they were even in) to a 5 in less than a week. That's a mighty big leap, and there are at least 2 quality 6 seeds in Michigan State and West Virginia that I would rank ahead of them.
But really, the only thing that clouds my silver lining today is the knowledge that, when Iowa and Syracuse meet, only one of them will be able to advance to the Final Four. You would have thought that the committee could have given my needs a little more direct consideration.
You want your printable brackets? We got your printable brackets.
5 Upset Specials (Pick one)
1. San Diego St over Indiana
2. Pacific over BC (check PU's recent history)
3. Utah St. over Washington (5-12)
4. NC State over California (not that much an upset)
5. Albany over Connecticut (not really. just checking to see if you're still reading)
Two notes from the television coverage yesterday:
Dickie V drove me insane! He had metal buttons on his sleeves, and every time he flailed about (once every .3 seconds), his buttons clinked on the glass top on set. By the end of the show, all I could hear while he was speaking was CLINK (blah blah blah) CLINK (blah blah blah) CLINK.
Jim Nantz and Billy Packer were like little kids when they were talking to Craig Littlepage, this year's Selection Committee chair. When the camera was on them, they were looking down at their sheets, and every question they asked seemed designed to try and get him to admit that he'd made a mistake. At the end of their interview, they cut him off twice as he was trying to congratulate the teams that made it into the field. First, he's chair of a committee of many people, all of whom agreed on the decisions. Second, I think I'd trust decisions made over several days by the selection committee before I'd trust Jim Freaking Nantz's 5-minute-old impressions. I disagree with some of their decisions, but I appreciate the difficulty of making them. Nantz and Packer were downright rude and embarrassed themselves and their network.
Wow, this is a mishmash. But that's all for the moment.
]]>Well, it's happening now. As I type this. Reset your blogrolls, feed subscriptions, etc. I've been having so many problems with the comment filters here that to spend any more time tweaking this site doesn't make sense when that time could be more productively applied to my new digs.
They're still very much in progress, but the new site works at least.
I'll be leaving this site in place for the foreseeable future. Too many archive links would go nutso if I vanished them. But I'll be closing down comments and trackbacks shortly, and eventually figuring out ways to subtly herd readers of even the archived entries over to my new space.
The blog it tells me that it's about. damn. time. That is all.
Update? Yes, it's true. I wanted to offer a little incentive for hastening your way over to my "new" site, and so I've posted my first ever screencast for your viewing, listening, and thinking pleasure. I'm crossing my fingers about the "pleasure" part of that...
]]>In the idealized world of "brains on sticks," we all choose graduate programs according to perfectly rational criteria, select our committees based purely on their explicit expertise in our exam areas and dissertation subjects, blah blah blah. In the real world, though, we work with people based on intuition, fit, compatibility, and all sorts of criteria that are, for the most part, immeasurable. It's certainly important to ask the rational questions about a given program, but I think we underplay the degree to which we make decisions by simply asking: can I imagine myself being successful here? can I see myself working well with this person? would I enjoy taking courses with these students?
In other words, I think it's important to give our prospective students as much access to the program as possible, and not just in the form of promotional materials. Likewise, it helps us to decide when we have a chance to actually talk with a student about his or her interest in X or Y, and not just attempt to intuit their abilities and interests from a generic 2-page statement of goals. As I said last year, this is an exceptionally ethical practice, and I think that it pays dividends for us in the quality of our students and for the students as well, both those who join us and those who don't. Even when we lose someone to another institution, I feel good about the fact that we've given them as much information as we could, and helped them to make the best decision possible.
As important as events like these are for us, they're also pretty taxing. Over the past 5 months, I've hosted a symposium of visiting speakers, co-chaired a search committee, coordinated 4 campus visits, and finally, as of a couple of hours ago, completed Visiting Days. None of this did I do alone; in fact, I'm deeply grateful for every single airport run, meal companion, feedback email, and general contribution that the people in our program provided throughout these events.
But oh. my. am I exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Saturday has just begun, but I plan to spend as much of it asleep as I possibly can. And then I can start in on all the to-do's that I've postponed during my event planning.
That is all.
]]>One of the peculiarities of working on the site is that our archive necessarily moves in both directions--as new issues are released, we add them to the site, of course, but we're also moving steadily backwards, at roughly an issue a week, or a volume per month. The process is slightly different for either direction, and there are certain parts of the process that simply get more intensive with each new issue that we add.
But the big news is that, as of a few minutes ago, I compiled the data for Volume 47, Issue 1, which was originally published in February of 1996. Technically, it's 10.75 volumes (since there was a 2-issue volume that shifted publication from the calendar year to the academic year), but it's definitely 10 years. So in a strange way, today is the archive's 10th birthday. In less than a year, we've managed to archive 10 years worth of the journal, interlinked the journals forwards and backwards, and generated a keyword index for those 10 years, using del.icio.us.
Not bad. Not bad at all. The further along we've gotten, the more conscious I am of some of the limitations of the approach we're taking, but for a cottage project, it's pretty darn good.
In honor of the archive's 10th birthday, then, here are the top ten tags from the past ten years of the journals (203 essays indexed). As I've discussed before, we generate the tags by parsing each article for nouns and noun phrases, and then take the most frequent to use as tags. We try to keep variations minimal, but there are some obvious synonyms that we haven't combined as well--there's probably an article in all of the tiny decisions I've had to make in compiling this data...
Top Ten Tags for CCC, 1996-2006
Students (159)
Writing (129)
Composition (78)
Language (37)
Literacy (36)
Discourse (33)
Rhetoric (33)
Pedagogy (32)
Community (28)
Work (28)
(I should mention that Derek and I will be talking about the site more generally next month at CCCC, as part of the Computer Connection. You'll find us there on Thursday at 1:45, appropriately enough during the C Session.)
That's all.
]]>
Okay, so it's not as bad as all that here today, but it's steady enough and ongoing enough that the roads never quite get clear, and it freezes when it hits the windshield, and when it comes down to it, after my fender bender a couple of years ago, I don't push it if I don't have to.
Worse comes to worst, I can always trudge up the hill to the RiteAid for some Mr. Pibb and some red vines.
]]>Oh, and I should mention that this CD reminded me, yet again, why I don't like ordering CDs from places like Amazon. The disc arrived, and inside the case, which was of course packed without any padding whatsoever, all of the little plastic thingies that hold a CD in place inside the case had snapped off. It was packed so tightly that they didn't drift around or scratch the disc (which would have truly pissed me off), but still. It's not that tough to design packaging that might truly protect a disc, is it?
Second, as I've discussed here before, Battlestar Galactica is the best sci-fi show on television right now, and last night's ep did not disappoint in that regard. One of the best characters has been Gaius, who's both a genius and the single most responsible person for the near-annihilation of the human race. Gaius also happens to routinely hallucinate in the form of his Cylon lover--it's unclear whether this is psychological or some sort of direct Cylon plot. Anyhow, last night's episode occurred mostly deep in the heart of Cylon country, and believe me when I say that it made this whole plot point exponentially more interesting.
Without spoiling too much, I'll simply say that most shows don't bother to think through the implications of events for the "villains"--our "heroes" are allowed to struggle, change, and/or triumph, but typically the enemies are part of the backdrop against which those things happen. Not so with BSG.
Great, great episode of a great, great show. Watch it. Now.
]]>If I'm going to be honest about it, then I have to admit that there's a little of that going on here. When I see a friend called out as an asshat, an idiot, a pretentious academic, et al., I don't think anyone would fault me for feeling a little defensive on that person's behalf.
In the comments at one of the sites mentioned above, Jeff's point is paraphrased thusly:
All the anonymous bloggers do it out of fear, which proves Tribble right; they don't do it in order to experiment with forms or personae.
That paraphrase differs so wildly from my own perception of the article that I have to wonder how much of this is hangover from the various "nymous" fights that have broken out at various points in the short history of academic blogging. That is, I can't help but feel that there's a predisposition at work in reading the essay that way. And I'm more than happy to acknowledge that this predisposition is probably justified (and that my own predisposition is to read the article more generously).
And yet. I know for a fact that Jeff finds no merit whatsoever in Tribble. And I know that there are plenty of pseudonymous bloggers who exemplify what Jeff is after in that article. And yet I agree largely with what he says. So let me take a crack at it:
Perhaps his point would have been a little clearer had he included examples beyond pseudonymous blogging. There are those who see that kind of blogging as a form of self-censorship, and to be fair, it is. But it's only fair if we acknowledge (and I do) the degree to which nymous bloggers self-censor as well. There are lots of things that I don't talk about in this space, and while there are plenty of reasons behind those choices, one of them is the same fear that everyone else has. The fact that we have a separate word for being fired for blogging suggests how pervasive that fear is. That's one aspect of this generalized "seriousness."
Another is the tendency to domesticate blogging by using it in classrooms, as some of us have tried. By making it "count" towards a grade, we make it "serious" in ways that can undercut the energy we were hoping to bring to our courses in the first place. Another comes from those of us who include blogs amongst the texts and/or communities we study. Another is the argument that our blogs should be counted in our accounts of our academic activity, an argument that is tantamount to demanding that our colleagues take blogs "seriously." (If that's not a recipe for potential stagnation...)
The Tribble article, and the nerve that it struck (which I took to be Jeff's point in raising it), speaks further to the seriousness that can permeate not just academic blogs, but all blogs by academics. And believe me when I say that I fully understand the reasons why some people might not want to blog under the kind of cloud that Tribble (and our Tribblicious colleagues) represents.
If there's a mistake in Jeff's characterization, it's to emphasize only the fear behind psuedonymous blogging, a fear that most if not all of us must negotiate at one point or another. Blogging with a pseudonym permits many things that a real name does not. What Jeff (rightly) notices is that it's typically those kinds of posts that IHE links to, and so if one's access to those blogs comes through that portal, I can fully see how one would conclude that there's a culture of fear and complaint operating. My own opinion is that this has to do far more with IHE's editorial decisions than with any kind of uniformity on the part of academics who blog, pseudonymous or no. My limited sense of those communities is that they're far more about support than they are about complaint.
And yet, real names also permit certain kinds of posts that pseudonyms do not. My (crusading, serious) entries on the Facebook issue last week held a certain amount of credibility, and (I hope) accomplished a little more because they were tied directly to someone with direct and proximate insight into the situation and someone who actively studies the phenomena in question. Could I have written about the episode pseudonymously? Of course, but I couldn't have written about it in the same way.
And no, I'm not trying to offer a scenario according to which pseudonymous blogs must be somehow considered "less than." My point is merely that each choice offers certain possibilities and certain constraints. The seriousness I take Jeff to be talking about, though, is a constraining force that affects us all. I don't take him to be suggesting, were all pseudonymous bloggers to start blogging under their real names, that the problem he identifies would magically be solved. Because it wouldn't. Because I'd still worry about whether or not to comment about local events, and worry about how what I write might be misread by people who can affect my future. On my best days, I push those worries aside and do what I do. I assume that's true of us all.
Bottom line is that I don't think that the problem Jeff describes is intrinsic to one or another group of bloggers. Rather, it's something that we all struggle with, and could probably all struggle against a little more often. To me, that's the broader issue that's getting lost a little bit.
That's all.
Update: New Kid and Nels have really smart followup posts that are worth looking at.
Also, for some reason, my filters are throttling attempts to leave comments--they just blocked me from posting something, too. If you want to leave a comment here, and are willing to drop it into an email to me, I'll post it. Sorry about that.
]]>That was my thought as I caught Ben V's latest over at if:book. In particular, check out the description of the subtitling for the American release of the Russian movie Night Watch:
What they've done is played with the subtitles themselves, making them more active and responsive to the action in the film [snip]:"...[the words] change color and position on the screen, simulate dripping blood, stutter in emulation of a fearful query, or dissolve into red vapor to emulate a character's gasping breaths."
Very cool. The idea of spicing up the traditional white text at the bottom of the screen is something that should have occurred to someone (me!) long before now.
Also, mainly bc I want to save it for future reference:
The problem with contemporary discussions about the future of the book is that they are mired -- for cultural and economic reasons -- in a highly inflexible conception of what a book can be. People who grew up with print tend to assume that going digital is simply a matter of switching containers (with a few enhancements thrown in the mix), failing to consider how the actual content of books might change, or how the act of reading -- which increasingly takes place in a dyanamic visual context -- may eventually demand a more dynamic kind of text.]]>
Not that I'm feeling particularly serious lately or anything. Well, that's not quite right. The truth is that there are times when, despite my best efforts, the serious overtakes me, where it seemingly surrounds me on every side. Where every sentence ends up getting weighed against possible readings, especially at a time (like now) where I'm involved both in faculty searches and graduate admissions.
Times like these I can feel my blogging slow down to a crawl--even if no one else perceives them, I can chart my moods pretty accurately by looking through my archives, and seeing how frequently I post, what I post about, and what I don't post about.
...
That long pause was me reading about four months worth of archives, and forgetting what exactly I was going to say here. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. I had something to say, and forgot it.
Come back tomorrow, and maybe I'll have remembered.
]]>Every day, for two weeks, I walked upstairs, having seen the poster, sometimes several times a day, mentally vowing to actually look up Scout Niblett on-line, so that I might sort these and other associations. Every day, that vow lasted only approximately as long as it took me to reach the top of the stairs, supplanted by other, presumably more important, activities.
You would be entirely justified in wondering: if it takes him two whole weeks just to look up some random singer on the Internet, how much longer do matters of consequence require?
I'm just saying, you'd be justified.
]]>As I myself have thought about the watery philosophy and the powerful technology that dovetail so neatly in Web 2.0, I've become convinced that we're building a machine that will, to great and general applause, destroy culture.
More provocation than fully developed thesis, this is what made me think today.
I don't think he's right, and I think there are the Long Tail arguments to support my opinion, but only if you understand that the "pure" LT position isn't that LT automatically equals quality. Rather, it's that LT outlets lower the threshold for sustainability of niche opinions, texts, communities, many of which will be crap, and a few of which we'll have been glad to have. I'm thinking here, for example, of the way that Anderson describes Netflix's ability to sustain a market for documentaries.
But I appreciate Carr's willingness to poke at the near-sacred way that plenty of LT (and Web2.0) arguments simply take for granted that more = better. I guess I feel that the opposite case (more = worse) is no more accurate...
]]>So here are two utterly frivolous observation/comments:
Is it totally mean of me to suggest that perhaps Lindsay Jacobellis should have waited until after the race to check her board and make sure that her Visa Check Card wasn't missing? Yeah, probably so.
And speaking of mean (but still somehow completely hilarious), I should preface this by noting that while I'm really not much of a reality TV fan, I have gotten into Project Runway on Bravo over the past two seasons. Yes, this is a guilty pleasure. One of the contestants this season, Santino, does a spot-on imitation of Tim Gunn, who's kind of the fashion coach on the show (he doesn't judge the candidates, but tries to help them here and there, keep them on task, etc.). Anyhow, there's a video snippet on the Bravo site, where one of the other contestants has Santino do his Tim impersonation to sing NIN's "Closer to God." If you watch the show at all, it is sooo worth your time to download the (<1 MB) MP3. Really. It is priceless.
That's all.
]]>Let me start with a snippet from Katherine Hayles's new book My Mother Was a Computer (a book I hope to review once I've (a) turned back into Dr. Banner, and (b) gotten much more of my workload under control). Hayles attempts to make the case that we need to consider "code" at the same conceptual level as "speech" and "writing," sort of a parallel to Ulmer's (among others) orality, literacy, and electracy. Hayles writes
Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language. When language is said to be performative, the kinds of actions it "performs" happen in the minds of humans...[examples]...code running in a digital computer causes changes in machine behavior and, though networked ports and other interfaces, may initiate other changes, all implemented through transmission and execution of code (50).
Now, I'm taking liberties here a bit with Hayles's work, but my broader argument the past few days is that the difference among dorm room conversations, passing notes in class, and posting comments on Facebook are the differences among speech, writing, and code. The three aren't separate, of course, and Hayles says as much. But the issue I have with Scott and IHE's coverage of this event is that they have failed to appreciate the degree to which they are not simply "writing" about Facebook. They are also coding the event by creating resources that are more visible, accessible, and available, and for a longer period of time, than any of these other analogs.
Clay Spinuzzi puts it this way, rather nicely:
Collin's point is that defamation becomes a de facto part of a person's online record - the "portfolio" (my term) that Google and Yahoo are constantly assembling for everyone with an online presence:
When you write about this situation, and then code it, you are effectively contributing material to the online portfolio of each of the people involved. This is particularly relevant to those sites that have exploited the naivete of the students in that course--an irony I pointed out yesterday in reference to the fact that the Internet is far more a "permanent record" than a student's file at a university. The latter is protected by FERPA among other things, while IHE and other sites endure no such limitation.
Today's newspaper may be tomorrow's bird cage liner, but today's Internet story can be future employers' search results, even as far as several years down the line. You can still, with relative ease, locate things that I said and did in graduate school back in the mid-90s. That's one of the ways I would interpret Hayles's notion of "strong performativity"--by publishing names, by reprinting the page itself, by reproducing the comments, you are, literally, performing and participating in the event in a way that the "shield" of journalistic objectivity and coverage does not fully account for.
In this case, and let me put this as bluntly as possible, if you are willing to cede the possibility that this page constituted harassment (a possibility fully in line with determinations made both by SU and by Facebook), then it is not enough to simply put quotes around the page, or remove it from the "front" with a link. It is not enough to absolve you of the responsibility of considering that you, in consciously reproducing this document, have actively participated in the harassment that you are "reporting."
To assert that you are not responsible is to deny the very real, material effect that certain kinds of language have on the people around us. And it is to deny the very real, material differences among media. To post something hurtful, and to do so with the alibi that the material did not originate with you, is still to post something hurtful. And it is to implicitly reinforce that pain.
All the way throughout this discussion, I have not said anything about restricting Facebook, and I won't, because I don't hold them responsible for what was said. Once they learned about the abuse of their site, however, they had a choice to make. They could either leave the page in place, or remove it. There was no choice that they could make that was neutral. I believe that they made the proper decision.
Similarly, IHE and other sites posting screen grabs are making choices that themselves influence the perception of the story. By allowing these words and images to persist (without, as Spencer suggested, blurring anything), they are weighing in on the side of those who would permit this kind of behavior, because they themselves are reproducing the behavior for a wider audience. In the interests of "coverage," they are, inadvertently or not, affecting the lives of the people whose names they've "covered."
They are, of course, free to do so.
They are, however, also accountable for doing so.
And that's all I have for right now. I persist in the hope that more of us will do the right thing here.
]]>