Reading Geoffrey Rockwell’s research notes often makes me want to poke some more around TAPoR. Today, I found there a wonderfully elegant definition of text – “any record of human communication that can be digitally represented.” Certainly not a definition that would have been possible even a decade ago; but now that we Have The Technology, it is exactly appropriate. Nicely done.
frye on disciplinarity
Willard McCarty, a London-based computing humanist and one of the best all-around people I’ve ever known, posted this quote by Northrop Frye to the Humanist list:
“It takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures.”
-“The Beginning of the Word”. Ontario Council of Teachers Keynote Address, 30 October 1980. Indirections 6 (Winter 1981). Reprinted in Northrop Frye, On Education. Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988, pp. 9-21.
I should remember this, in about half a year when I’m really on edge about finishing the dissertation and having an argument or anything at all to contribute to the field. Oh, generally this sort of thoughts doesn’t plague me, but it happens to everyone, right? Well, it helps at times like that to think of your discipline as the absolute caput mundi (okay, I just really wanted to use this phrase). The arrogance of such thoughts, I assure you, is always mitigated by the awareness of all that other knowledge out there, knowledge I will never experience first-hand. I’d very much like to have some sort of common language with others, any single other and all of them, who hold knowledge that is inaccessible to me.
Sometimes it bothers me that anything I do, including my chosen profession, is so closely tied to self-expression. It seems… well, arrogant. On the other hand, it’s also an indicator of high-level personal involvement which, for me, is easier to maintain than a constant state of keeping everything at arm’s length.
xml editor?
Happy women’s day!
It’s International Women’s Day. Happy 8th of March!
Despite the lack of updates, it’s been an eventful month. I gave a talk at a brown-bag seminar at, well, Brown; and it went remarkably well. Ethan moved here from Seattle, which consumed us logistically for a week or two but, oh, is worth it. Both my work and my personal well-being are much improved.
Entirely selfishly, I am giddy to have access to both a ricemaker and a breadmaker now. Oh, and a wok. These implements of culinary creation, coupled with finding a couple of excellent Southeast Asian markets around Providence, have rather shaken up my daily diet in the best of ways. Incidentally, as long as you stay away from Thai Kitchen brand anything, I cannot recommend mamster’s Thai curry highly enough. Actually, here: take a look at his other food writings. They are as amusing as they’re informative.
E. and I have successfully (“victory!!”) collaborated on writing a paper abstract, which was submitted too late to be considered for a conference session, but we’ll find a venue for it. We continue to talk about the logistics of RolandHT and I am hopeful for the project, if a little frustrated by not dedicating quite enough time to it. This last one should improve now that the exciting double-appointment, Italian-and-Comp-Lit faculty search is over. Amongst the applicants are a couple of really excellent women, and I fervently hope that one of them will join us.
I have begun to teach Italian to RISD students. They’re a trip, complete sweethearts, and that priceless combination of razor-sharp and willing to throw themselves into conversation in a language they barely know. It’s a really fun gig, and although it’s technically a distraction from what I should be doing (*cough* dissertation *cough*), it’s actually great for my own morale.
Tomorrow evening, I go in for a sleep study. That’s exciting! Perhaps we’ll find out why I become sleepy, regardless of how rested I am, if I sit in one place for too long. Becomes a bit of a problem when spending long hours at a computer, or, say, driving to Boston…
The weather had been improving until the weekend. Saturday it rained and rained; Sunday it was sunny and gorgeous; and today, it is snowing again. But the days, they are getting longer; and my mood is definitively on an upswing. We’re full of activity over here. I keep noticing little things and mentally filing them in the “to blog” category, and… well, you know.
Earlier this morning, right around 6:30, a skunk waddled across our neighbors’ backyard. It was light already, so either it spaced on the whole hide-in-daylight thing, or it was rabid. Cute.
Cybertext review
I’m not a very astute self-promoter, am I? A few weeks ago, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies published my review of Espen Aarseth‘s Cybertext. If you have any comments, I’d be interested.
MLA session change
I am pleased to announce an addition to ACH-sponsored session “Electronic Theory and Criticism” at this year’s MLA convention in San Diego. Thom Swiss, of University of Iowa, has graciously agreed to be a respondent to the papers. The full details of the session are below; we hope to see you there!
Please pass this information on to people you think may be interested.
Saturday, 27 December
8. Electronic Theory and Criticism
3:30-4:45 p.m., Cunningham A, Manchester Grand Hyatt
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
Presiding: Vika Zafrin, Brown Univ.
1. “Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship,” Cheryl E. Ball, Michigan Technological Univ.
2. “The Simultaneous South: An Electronic, Multilinear Approach to Borges’s ‘The South,'” Marjorie Luesebrink, Irvine Valley Coll., CA
Respondent: Thomas Swiss, Univ. of Iowa.
Digital Variants
I’ll be doing some work with Domenico Fiormonte on his (and University of Edinburgh’s) project Digital Variants, a “contemporary authors digital archive.” Living, breathing, writing writers donate various published and unpublished versions of their texts to the project. You can see the evolution of a piece from one publication to another, for example. Faculty has also made some of their relevant teaching materials available, and some student essays have been put up as an example of the usefulness of variant-based study of literature.
Theory and history and one in the other. (Is this nesting?)
At lunch with Roberto today, I found myself formulating for the first time why I find most theory boring, if taken apart from any primary texts to which it could be applied. I don’t have a very good handle on it yet, but as a start, the sort of theory that I’m talking about is verbose and usually has schools. It frustrates me when theory is presented not as a lens, a filter, a secondary through which to view what’s Really Important (a text, a piece of music, a work of visual art), but as an end in itself. That’s what I find boring. I also noted that there’s a lot more theory flying around in the field [1] of literature than there is in, say, art or music. Those, the “applied arts,” have more history and less theory.
But historians have their own theoretical approaches to explaining the past, don’t they? So where does history end and theory begin?
[1] For the record, I do find that the academic separation among form[at]s of artistic expression is artificial and mostly nonsensical.
Busy, body.
As my compatriots stop to consider the implications of today’s horrible anniversary, I largely tune out the world until the evening in order to get through the day.
It’s been a turbulent week or so, complete with sickness, homecoming and post-BM depression. One piece of radically good news is that I have a job. Hooray, it’s an interesting and novel research fellowship! Working with Prof. David Kertzer should be fun; he seems to always have a million projects going, and I get to learn things like strategies for preparing a book for publication. Also, importantly, I do not have to worry about whence this semester’s bread originates.
I am slowly ridding my living space of distractions: they finally disconnected cable modem service today, and my file folders have been cleaned out, purged of two-thirds of all the paper in them. For the next several weeks, I’ll be digitizing the rest of my Roland materials, and the rest of the semester will see theme and imagery markup for the corpus. This allows me to ignore for the moment the frightening prospect of having to come up with an interface for the project: this is by far my weakest knowledge base. We’ll worry about this next semester: I’ve given up trying to learn anything computer-related only in theory. Learn by doing.
Unless it’s Perl, for which O’Reilly has already graciously provided exercises.
My household is slowly starting to feel like mine, again. Cooking is a sublime pleasure; I am discovering better ways to cook for one, which has always been difficult in the past. I am also eating significantly less than before I’d left for the summer: a week in the desert after two and a half months’ worth of sunny California fruits and vegetables, followed by several days’ drive, seems to have finally knocked my body out of the habit of eating when it’s not hungry. This is both pleasing and centering.
Speaking of centering, I cannot recommend The Yoga Deck highly enough, for those interested in such things.
We seem to be getting a humanities computing seminar off the ground here at Brown. Invited talks will be open to the public, I’m presuming; so stay tuned for announcements. I think the first talk is mid- or late October; when it gets confirmed, I’ll post details. The list of speakers is pretty impressive.
Finally, I’ve been thinking about ways of advertising the course I’m teaching next semester (Codex to Code: an Introduction to Humanities Computing) to the community at large. It’s a University Course, unaffiliated with any specific academic department (although co-sponsored for approval by Italian Studies and Modern Culture and Media). Nobody has to take it to fulfill a major, but then, Brown’s undergraduate careers are largely unstructured anyway. It’s never been taught before, so it seems important for the word to get out. I’ll probably send out sets of flyers to instructors teaching related courses this semester, and perhaps drop in on some class sessions taught by people I know. Posting ads in key campus locations also seems potentially useful, but I’ve no clue as to its real value. Other ideas, anyone?
metaleptic world
I’ve done no work in the last couple of weeks. None. Been either too busy, or too mentally and emotionally exhausted. Tomorrow a very welcome houseguest arrives; I’ll probably get to do some work over this visit, strangely enough. This is why I like writers! They can amuse themselves for an hour, easy.
You got your wish, François: I am unable to sleep because of metalepsis. In writing up Marie-Laure Ryan’s plenary talk of this past May, I’ll be going on my sparse notes, so please forgive and correct me if my recollection is wrong. I have a habit of quoting speakers directly when taking notes, but later do not have any way of figuring out which are the actual direct quotes, and what I paraphrased. (Typing quotation marks takes up too much time, when trying to record thoughts expressed at normal speaking speed.) Consequently, anything enclosed in quotation marks below refers to the notes file, and may or may not be a direct quote from the speaker. In other words, blame me not them.
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