Words’ End

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

Grounding.

I feel solid, personally—about time, I tell ya. It’s been a long three years since my separation from my life partner, and that’s ceasing to define me.

I’ve sunk my roots into Boston even further. Home feels like home. People feel like my people. Everything is always in transition, but many days this year I’ve been struck by how living feels. It feels like it did when I was a kid: sometimes, I’m not distracted by whatever’s in my head. Time goes more slowly. My filters aren’t filtering out quite so much of the world. I notice more little things—not beautiful little things, but ordinary ones. The sounds of street traffic, out there, all the time. The shuffle of the old lady passing by my window. People’s movement through Davis Square, in aggregate.

A ton of new knowledge acquired. This grounds me in my profession. Speaking of which: I have a new job. It’s still at BU, and starts in a couple of weeks, at which point I’ll write more about it. The job is also grounding: it will draw much more fully on my skillset, and further solidifies my geographic position.

I keep wanting to write something about Mark, and how our relationship relates to Word of the Year for me—it does in a cardinal, astounding way. But I haven’t yet figured out (again, post-divorce) how much I want to write about my personal life involving other people. So, redacted.

Taking up weight lifting again has helped my body feel more sound. Pun intended!

So: compared to this time last year, much better grounded.

Next year could have so many defining words that would thrill me. One possibility I wouldn’t mind: joy.

Some friends of mine are using today as an occasion for making lists of 77 things that… well, you get the idea.

I’m in Sleepy Hollow again, visiting my brother and family (cast of characters, again: Zhenya = brother; Jo Ann = sister-in-law; Tesher = nephew; right now also Jo’s mom Linda, who lives in Maine). Tesher and I stayed up super extra late to make this list.

I gotta say: the things below are stuff external to us. But he’s definitely one of MY 77 things.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Martha Nell Smith was awarded the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award by the University of Maryland, where she teaches. At the second of the above links you’ll find a video of her lecture, given on the occasion of this award, “The Humanities Are Not a Luxury.” In the wake of SUNY Albany’s astonishing decision to cut some key programs—French, classics, Russian, Italian and theatre—Smith talks with humor and a stable sort of passion about the humanities as an essential, indispensable part of what we do and are. Here are some of the things that she says:

There is no frigate, no bus, no plane, no space ship, no car, no train—none of these is like a book, like a song, like an operatic voice, like a painting, like a sculpture, like a drama. To help us imagine other lands and cultures, to help us cultivate that kind of compassion and empathy required for democracy, for practicing equality as a fundamental value, instead of the more primitive ‘better than’.

And also:

We should remind our administrators that the kind of education that enabled broad access to highest quality instruction and research, and made these United States a world leader—that kind of education can never be a gated community. And it must be worldly, reaching beyond any nation-state. Healthy, too, are reminders that business management is really not the best metaphor for knowledge workers. As was noted in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a better metaphor for knowledge workers is that of gardener. We work in fields. We cultivate.

What I’ve been pointing out is that unless you’re at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values. You don’t know the metaphor and its strength, and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it, and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science, and you are not safe in history, unless you are at home with the metaphor.

Smith rejects the rhetoric of a crisis in the humanities, a phrase often uttered. For more on the state of the humanities, see Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes opinion pieces: “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives” and its sequel, “Crisis of the Humanities II.” I find it more than a little odd that not once does Fish mention digital endeavors of any kind, but can’t say I’m surprised. He didn’t mention them two years ago when asking whether the humanities would save us, either. I don’t subscribe to Fish’s opinions, but the articles and comments on them are thought provoking. Martha Nell Smith’s lecture, on the other hand, I heartily endorse. It’s well worth the hour and ten minutes it’ll take to watch the video.

I came into work early today, and am taking some time to watch Martha Nell Smith‘s Distinguished Scholar-Teacher lecture titled “The Humanities Are Not a Luxury: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” given this month at UMD. I love listening to Martha Nell talk: her perceptiveness and her wicked sense of humor are a good in the world. So, as much as I wish there were a transcription of the lecture, I think the video is worth watching, and recommend it. (The lecture proper starts around minute 11-12.)

Meanwhile, though, have a quote from Audre Lorde:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

This coming week, everything happens at work. Tomorrow takes the cake, though: have to deal with a file share permissions emergency first thing; four meetings in the afternoon, back to back; and then the first evening session of the web application development course I’m taking. Then Friday I’m teaching the first iteration of the two-hour digital research methods workshop I wrote about here some weeks ago.

Exciting, all of it, but scary. On top of this, my mom is sick. (This is the part I’m compartmentalizing like crazy, because it would easily send me into panic if it were allowed to, and that’s just not helpful to anyone.)

On the plus sides, today was full of social goodness. Went to a brunch-and-Gattaca-showing, which was brilliant. Took a friend (and myself) shopping at a Russian supermarket. We were both sort of unreally happy with the experience, and talked and talked in the car both ways. Housemates were almost as pleased, and partook of the tasties. Then we watched Torchwood.

It’s pouring in every sense but the rainy. The weather is cool enough for sweatshirt and a scarf. All my nerve endings are at attention. Life’s edges are rather ill-defined, and frightening in this. Wouldn’t trade it, even if sometimes I need to be talked down from scraggly fear trees.

I’m in New York this weekend, visiting with family. Tesher is ten this year, lanky and giggly and energetic and sometimes a little… loud. You know, a ten year old. He loves BB guns, and also loves making art — painting and drawing are his favorites — and he’s getting to be pretty good at it.

Tonight we watched the first Matrix movie. He’d never seen any of them. His mind: blown, of course.

Got to the scene wherein Trinity asks Tank to load her up with the knowledge she needs to fly a particular model of helicopter. Tesher, by this point, is bouncing up and down and cheering. He’s agape at the implications of this one, though. An the first thing he says, imagining himself in the midst of the action, is: “‘I want to paint like Matisse!’ — boom!!!”

Yes, kid. You are, in fact, awesome.

Seasonal changes, for the most part.

Many of my friends are busily packing for Burning Man. I’m not going this year, and it’s the right decision, and mostly I prefer it to going (this year), but damn, I miss the playa.

Today I experienced a full-on blood sugar crash for what might have been the first time ever. Martin said, when I got home, “Wow! Congratulations on going this long without!” Honestly, I can do without ever experiencing this again. The 25-minute walk that was the beginning part of my after-work commute ended in me entering the T station, shaking. The train came pretty much immediately, and by the time I got out at Davis three stops later, I couldn’t see or think straight. The ten-minute walk from there to my house was unthinkable, so I sat at a cafe and ate a croissant. And then another one, this time filled with sweet cheese for more fat and sugar. Then I walked home, and felt vaguely week by the time I got there.

What the hell? I hadn’t starved myself today, far from it. I was a bit low on carbohydrates, but not that low. But maybe it just wasn’t my day. Twenty minutes ago I dropped a laptop power supply on my toe; my allergies have been acting up; and mere moments ago a tree fell down right outside my window. It would’ve fallen on top of my car, except Martin was borrowing it to transport some heavy paper objects and moved it a few minutes prior.

I’m going to sleep now. Please don’t let the world blow up in the next few hours. And please let me successfully fight off this cold by morning.

I’ve been following a discussion over on a friend’s blog about the recent Guardian article titled “Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny.” Bidisha, the article’s author, discusses casual sexism — the kind you’ll overhear in public transit and in coffee shops, the kind that a coworker will bring into your world while completely unaware they’re doing it. Or worse, being aware and not caring. It’s a real, serious, and insidious problem that should be voiced often.

But not the way Bidisha is doing it, for goodness’ sake. Her discourse is shooting its own cause in the head.

Two moments in her article bring me to disproportionate anger, because they exemplify rhetoric that is not only damaging but actually, it seems, in largely uncritical favor with the crowd where I get most of my politics on. (This statement has much more generalized data behind it than the single post I’ve referred to.) One: “Any man who thinks it’s OK to live in a household where the woman does the overwhelming majority of all the housework, childcare and family admin is a woman-hater. If he weren’t, it would agonise him to live in such an unequal and exploitative setup.” And two: “So, what to do about casual sexism? Don’t perpetrate it yourself, call it when you see it and fight any man defending his misogyny or any woman defending her false consciousness.”

Taking most of the nuance out of my reaction to these statements, we’re left with: in what universe is this helpful to anybody?

Let’s break this down. Just the one LiveJournal post I’ve witnessed discussing the article has 109 comments on it so far. Clearly, it says things that people find it interesting to talk about, to think over. Isn’t that already helpful in spurring dialogue? No, I don’t think it is. Because this is the choir right here, the one Bidisha is preaching to. We are the friendliest of allies. Most of us evidently aren’t repelled by the way she phrases things. No warning flags go off in our heads upon reading those words in the larger context of the article.

But just as decisions about who does what around the house don’t exist in a vacuum, neither does her article — and there’s a hell of a lot more responsibility on Bidisha, what with the power of the press, to be balanced enough to get through to people. To not alienate people. To make her point, be loud and clear, and at the same time avoid giving the impression that the author is a nutter, frothing at the mouth. Because shenanigans like the above are going to get her ignored and the efforts of the people in her political camp undermined.

Here’s what I think of the substance (as opposed to the very poor form) of the two quotes above. With the false consciousness, she can take that horse and ride it right back out. She doesn’t get to conscript me into her black-and-white camp on the basis of my gender, and she doesn’t get to guilt trip me if I don’t go bleating assent. The issues around sexism and gender roles in the Anglo West are multifaceted, prismatic. Looking at them closely, you get a different picture every second because there are just so many factors that go into our gendered behaviors. And no Guardian writer gets to write off anyone else’s opinions as unexamined based on grossly incomplete information.

The bit about men who think it’s OK to live in households with unequal household labor division being woman-haters isn’t just absurd and factually wrong, it’s slander of some of feminism’s most important allies. Plenty of those men are ignorant, many are sexist, a good proportion are woman-haters. And a significant number have given the matter a lot of thought, often in concert with their female partners, and have made their decisions according to what makes everyone involved happiest.

Are those decisions informed by a sexist society? Certainly. Do these people help perpetuate it? Only if you limit your gaze at those situations to a cursory one. What they are doing is living by example. They might do well to talk about these hot-button topics from their perspectives, male and female alike; we need those voices. But they should not be changing the way they live on simply because they appear to be upholding the patriarchy. That’s an absurd, defeatist demand based on appearances and not substance.

None of this is to say that the fact of uneven household labor distribution, and the ways in which it plays out most of the time, isn’t sexist. It is. It is bad when it’s unexamined. When it’s considered, it’s significantly less bad. When it’s a conscious choice by generally thinking and aware people, you and I and Bidisha don’t get to judge it bad at all unless we know more intimate details about these people’s lives. Who are you to say they aren’t compensating in some other arena? Who am I to dictate how people should approach situations where nobody actually involved feels deprived, and nobody is harmed? This is a slippery-slope argument, given how many victims consent to being victimized because they don’t see any way out. But that doesn’t give us license to erase the line between unconsidered and thoroughly considered decisions, no matter how similar they look from the outside.

As for the discourse… sometimes I wonder why I bother. “Rhetoric” and “discourse” are dirty words to so many people. The concepts are ridiculed, dismissed as having nothing to do with the real world. But rhetoric matters. Discourse matters. It’s all we have here in the real world. What we say and how we say it are equally important, and both become much more so when volatile topics like gender roles are involved. Cutting Bidisha so much slack that this crap she says is mostly ignored in the name of a larger context is irresponsible. It’s the crap that will be most damaging to the relevant causes, and turning a blind eye to it just because the author writes about sexism in the Guardian is a bad thing to do.

I’m making a topic list for some digital research methods workshops. This is a request for feedback and/or supplements!

Some background first. The school I work at is a theological seminary existing within a Research I university. The students in it are all [post]graduate: Master’s- and doctoral-level. Some degrees are more vocationally oriented; others—more research-oriented. This refers to what the students do after they leave here; all of our graduate programs involve the usual amounts of traditional scholarship. Some also involve field work.

I aim for these to be one-off, two-hour workshops offered to every student near the beginning of their time here. There will be two different workshops, one for most of the Master’s-level students, the other for our advanced Master’s and all doctoral students. The topic list is more or less the same, with different areas of emphasis for each workshop.  For those people writing theses and dissertations, there will be an additional hour-long workshop touching on things like how to properly format things in MS Word (sigh; yes, really—nobody teaches them this stuff!), open access, authorship etc.

These might more rightly be called digital scholarship primers, I don’t know. In any case, “digital research methods” might be a misnomer. I actually don’t think that it is. Implicit in the topic list below is my belief that the use of digital resources that feed you information and the use of digital tools to directly create new knowledge are different skill sets, but both classifiable as digital research.  If you think I’m off the mark here, I’d welcome your reasoning—not to make you justify yourself, but to gain more perspective—and/or suggestions for other workshop titles.

Here’s what I have so far. What would you add? Do you see problems with my thinking that I’m not seeing? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m on a plane from Seattle to Minneapolis and then to Boston, finishing up ten days of travel.  When we were taking off, Rainier Mountain just out my window was rising above the lower clouds, its head just touching the upper layer. Gorgeous and apt: the past week has given me new knowledge and a wider perspective.

I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria!  This was made possible by the DHSI and by my dean, and I’m grateful to both.  The Institute’s ninth year was my first time attending, and it was an intense experience.  Something like 35 hours of instruction over five days; evening plenary talks and early-morning graduate student presentations for four of those.  I took the large project planning and management course with Lynne Siemens. It was even more exciting and useful than I’d expected it to be. Who would’ve thought I’d be into project management?  But bring industry-born ideas about cat herding resource wrangling into academe, and I’m there.  We talked about juggling (often too-little) money and time and people, getting folks to be as excited about your ideas as  you are, getting your head around a project in the first place.  We had guest speakers in almost every class and got to plan our own projects.  All of this delightfully low-tech: I’m bringing back large sheets of flip-chart paper with wild scribbles and post-it notes.  Now to get grant funding for this thing.  (Grant application is in, but we don’t find out for a couple more months.  If we don’t get funded, I imagine we’ll apply again.  In any case, the training will be applicable in other contexts, not least of them the everyday juggling of activities at work.)

The best part, of course, were the people.  I saw some old friends and acquaintances, and finally got to spend a bunch of time around Julie Meloni, who is moving to Victoria to work as a postdoc at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. (ETCL folks put on the Institute every summer—and let’s pause for a second to appreciate the work they do, and their success at it.)

Talking to Julie, and to Jentery Sayers, and Jon Bath, and Susan Brown, and the many other folk I met at UVic,  one thing is clear: networked technologies are finally at a stage where they can be reliably and cheaply used for long-distance collaboration in the digital humanities.  There’s no substitute for in-person interaction, but it’s also increasingly easy to work together over arbitrary distances, meeting in the same place every once in a while.  This is changing our work process.  It’s no longer just that we can email Word documents back and forth.  We can use combinations of text/audio/video chat, collaborative editing environments, remote file upload and syncing venues, online project management systems, even bibliography and research sharing systems to work on projects either synchronously or asynchronously, as circumstances permit, at times across many timezones.  All of these tools have been available for some time, but have been clunky or expensive or not easily interoperable.  The recent explosion of networked tools and services (some of them created by and for academics) is a perfect storm for academic collaboration.

At the beginning of the DHSI week I got pretty discouraged about my self-imposed geographic restriction to Boston.  All this activity swirling around me, watching people who have found inspiration in working with one another, felt like being on the outside looking in.  Which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered: nobody can do everything, and I have a job in Boston that’s at least nominally a digital humanities/digital libraries job.  But it does get lonely at BU sometimes.  There isn’t much DH activity either at the university or generally in New England. (Sure, Brown University is just an hour away, and THATCamp New England has just opened for applications.  But given that we’re in CollegeTownUSA land, there’s still woefully little DH work going on around here.  It’s ramping up, but slowly.)

Well, seems like there’s nothing like a little live interaction to get things going.  Seems I’m about to get involved in a couple of projects that will feed me in ways that will supplement the satisfaction I draw from current in-person work.  This is good both for me and for my workplace.  Information will flow through more channels, inspiration can be distributed. Perspective allows serendipity to do its unpredictable future thing.

I love Boston, and have good reasons to live where I live. This has meant passing on multiple opportunities to apply for jobs I’d no doubt enjoy. But I’ve placed a high priority on being near my people. It was a hard decision to make when I made it, but the rewards are constant and significant. And now, the trade-off doesn’t seem as big as it did even only three years ago.

Being a free agent in the age of networked communication is pretty exciting.