searching for the ineffable
This past Monday, I started my new job as Project Director of the Virtual Humanities Lab, a new NEH-sponsored project based here at Brown.
But what about your studies, you’ll ask? Dissertation and all that? Degree? Well, it went like this.
This past spring, the Virtual Humanities Lab Project was awarded a new NEH grant. Sadly, for a variety of reasons our Project Director Cristiana Fordyce was unable to stay with VHL. Suddenly, the project was in need of a director, and the position was offered to me. I considered the implications carefully, and accepted.
The core team for the project is one I’ve been a part of for years, with the Decameron Web. I know most of the quirks, and think that we’ll work really well together.
It’s a great opportunity. I will be working closely with both scholars and STG folks to create an infrastructure to enable collaborative scholarly annotation online, as well as to promote pedagogical use of our texts (which now include more than just the Decameron, and other authors besides Boccaccio). The principal elements of the job include grant report writing, research and paper writing (for conferences and publication), team management (gosh, but I dislike the T word…), technical documentation writing and complex Web tool design. I feel up to all of this, and think that it will significantly expand my skillset.
I was worried, of course, about the dissertation writing issue. Having seen too many of my colleagues struggle with this, and knowing my own weaknesses, I don’t expect to be able to write the dissertation in off-work hours. The decision was complicated also by the fact that the Graduate School had awarded me a dissertation fellowship for the next academic year.
This complication, however, turned out to also be the solution: the Graduate School agreed, contrary to its usual procedure, to defer the fellowship; so that I am assured to have it for the 2006-7 academic year, when I’ll hopefully be finishing up the degree.
The research and paper writing I mentioned above, which comprise a significant percentage of the job time-wise, should be more or less directly applicable to some of the theoretical parts of my dissertation. I also plan to continue hunting for more primary sources for RolandHT, and encoding them for experimentation during the intervening two years.
I should note that, although Cristiana has taken a [great!] job elsewhere, we still plan to work together, even with our third British musketeer Guyda Armstrong, on Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.
And that’s my news. The above is a modified copy-and-paste from an e-mail I sent to my dissertation committee; if it seems dry, it’s because I wasn’t sure they’d approve. So far, though, they seem to think this is a good thing, and I’m very glad for that. Their collective brilliance rather intimidates me on a regular basis.
Hopefully, this’ll mean I’ll be blogging more, too, and getting much more use out of that “humanities computing” category. Maybe I’ll even redesign my weblog, and port it to WordPress. Who knows?
Scaramuccia [It.] = skirmish. Both are of unknown origin, probably derived from Old French (according to the OED, anyway). See also scrimish, scrimmage, and forms of rubbish.
Go ahead, pronounce it. Let it roll off your tongue.
It really, really gets to me when I spend untold hours on a fellowship application, submit it, receive a personal e-mail by way of receipt, even… and then get rejected and do not hear about it. Honestly, considering the number of things I apply for, I expect to get mostly rejections. But why keep me stringing along? You want to reject me, fine; I applaud the many people who’re better suited to your venture. But do let me know, and preferably in a timely manner, so that I can go on with my life. How hard can it be?!
In academe, I cannot assume that silence equals rejection; things take forever, deadlines are hopeful at best and arbitrary as a matter of fact, people have too many things to do and continually overcommit. So I cannot take silence for an automatic no: they may just be running late. So it sits on my plate, for no reason at all, and I play the “should I e-mail them? should I wait some more?” game. Worse: weeks after the supposed notification date, I e-mail the authorities in question and get a form letter in response. For goodness’ sake! If you have a form letter, why in the world didn’t you send it to me before??
You wouldn’t know it from this post, but I’ve had an excellent day. RolandHT is coming together; we got haircuts and they are great, and for all of the stress that accompanies the week preceding a big event, it’s also by degrees easier to work long hours: the adrenaline keeps me going. I honestly wish I could call that up whenever I wanted, and get a lot of work done in a haze of sleepless, delirious joy.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is a great resource. They do weekly updates, and they have a one-way announcement-only mailing list that I find very convenient.
Today, they pointed me to the eScholarship Repository at UC, which seems interesting, especially as we’re about to talk about e-journals at the upcoming conference.
Speaking of which, “Online Resources for the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” is this upcoming weekend, and is open to all. It’s officially bilingual in Italian and English, but English-language abstracts and outlines are being put up, and there’ll be simultaneous translation available during discussion sessions. Should be fun.
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.
Well, the photos get a resounding vote of “enh” from me. They’re just uninspiring. You had to be there, if nothing else then for the olfactory paradise of chopped herbs and ground spices.
N.B.: if you’re a staunch vegetarian who is nauseated by the discussion of preparing meat, you might want to skip the rest of this post.
I’ve got to say, thinking that I could easily cut up a whole duck, just because I know fairly well how to do the same thing with chicken, was erroneous. Duck skin is rather more strongly attached than chicken skin is; plus, I couldn’t figure out how to partition it. Ethan’s googling powers saved me, of course; what I’d failed to understand is that the duck is both more fatty *and* more bony on its back than chicken. So I decided to save some of the bonier parts for a soup (to be made tomorrow) and soon I had three containers. The contents of one of them will be rendered, and will make for a good cooking medium for potatoes, fish, what have you.
I’ve got to say, I’m pretty proud of myself for not throwing away any part of the bird, which had admittedly been cleaned before they sold it to me. Its meat is providing us with two meals each, and we’ll have soup and cooking fat besides. Not bad, for a generally wasteful world.
So, here’s the recipe I made. It comes from Alexandra Greeley’s Asian Soups, Stews, & Curries, which I really must return to Mrs. Zogathon someday soon. Next time I make this, I’ll use more ginger, galangal and lemongrass, and will add some fresh chili peppers. This was surprisingly mild.
If you don’t know where to get certain ingredients, check to see if you have an Indian and/or Southeast Asian grocery store nearby. You can always resort to places like Whole Foods, but their herbs are both expensive and not as good. Also, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t use the Thai Kitchen brand of coconut milk. Use Chaokoh instead. Have four cups of it on hand.
Get a 4- to 5-pound duck, clean it and cut into serving pieces (or you could just get duck legs, I guess).
Prepare your herbs and spices. Throw all of the following in one bowl:
1 stalk lemon grass, trimmed and thinly sliced;
shred 3 kaffir lime leaves;
one 1″ piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped;
two Indonesian bay leaves, crumbled (I used regular Western bay leaves);
1 tsp’s worth of galangal root, minced;
1 tsp ground coriander;
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper;
1/2 tsp ground cumin;
1/4 tsp ground turmeric;
salt and sugar to taste.
Take 8 shallots and 4 garlic cloves, peeled and rouhly chopped. Put them in a blender or small chopper, add just enough water to process, and blend until smooth. This she calls “curry paste,” why, I don’t know.
Heat 1/3 cup of vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion-and-garlic paste and stir around for 2-3 minutes, until it’s fragrant. Add all the other spices, stir well and cook for about 5 minutes. That’s what she says, anyway; I cooked for about 7-8. Add a bit more oil if the mixture is too dry.
Add in the duck pieces, and make sure they’re thoroughly coated in the spices. Pour in the coconut milk (mix it up first if it’s separated; it’ll be hard to mix with all that meat in the pan). Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 1.5-2 hours. If the sauce gets too thick and/or shallow, add some water. For garnish, fry up some shallots and/or garlic until crunchy. Honestly, I skipped that last part.
Mmm, tasty. Do make some sticky rice to sop up all the saucy goodness. Make sure you stir the sauce before spooning it onto the rice; some of the herbs and roots stay crunchy, and in every tender bite there’s a little explosion of flavor.
In other news, my Italian class did marvelously well on their exam, all things considered. (They are a good and genial group, but this class is their very lowest priority. We do what we can!) The average grade was 7.5 percentage points higher than the average quiz grade! I’m duly impressed, and they seemed pleased too. We did the simple past today, their first Really Tough Topic, and they did well. I dare say I’m proud! And to think that I’ll have children someday. If that’s how it’s gonna be, at least sometimes, then I’m all for having children. Because, you know, I need convincing to have children.
G’night. Let me know if you make the duck; I’d be curious to find subtle but tasty variations.
All I wanted was to have all of the tags I’ve used so far in a project (in multiple files) at my disposal in drop-down lists in oXygen.
Problem is, while oXygen is great at learning all of the elements and their attributes you’ve used so far in a single document, this knowledge cannot be easily shared between documents.
Creating a DTD turns out to be impractical, because then I cannot easily add new elements to it.
The solution was, as usual, simple: with each new file I create, I include all of the previous files into it as entities. This way, oXygen sees all of the elements I’ve used thus far, and has no trouble learning new ones. When I’m done editing the newest file, the entities referring to other files are wiped.
This makes editing so much easier!
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.
Halley questions the week’s seven-day length, and I for one am with her. Actually, it’s more that April (well, post-friends’-wedding last weekend really) is one continuous work stint.
You know, I like it. It’s liberating. I don’t get to ignore laundry or bills or my teaching for too long; but most tasks can be put off if they need to be – and these days there are tangible results after every encoding stint, spurring me on. This, these days right now, is when I get to actually say what I’ve been waiting so long to say about the Roland corpus. I say it by putting angle brackets around my argument. By this coming weekend, I’ll have enough encoded that we can start playing with the semantic patterns that emerge. It’s been a long time coming, but now that it’s less than a month to presentation, the work is flying, exhilarating. I feel focused, and remember once again why I love my work so much.
