Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Make “10″ louder, or, the amplification of scholarly communication

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Here's a little spreadsheet I put together about Twitter use at three conferences: Digital Humanities 2009, THATcamp 2009, and the (just-ended) Modern Language Association convention of 2009: As you can probably see, what I did was to divide the total number of tweets during the date range of the ...

For Veterans’ Day: On John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

In honor of Veterans' Day (also known as Armistice Day), I'm posting here a short essay on the poem that inspired the Flanders poppy, John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields." This "essay" is actually a section of my 2004 dissertation, which concerns the 19-line poetic form called "the villanelle"; in the ...

On persuasion, perfectibility, and the abolishment of academic copyright

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Despite what Dan Cohen averred yesterday, Steven Shavell is apparently not arguing that we should abolish copyright for academic works. His title is a question -- "Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?" -- and it is a question that he claims to explore, not answer: On the basis of ...

The Asimov story in which a mother invents Twitter

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

I was busy this morning seeing my mother off after a weekend in which nothing, it seemed, could go wrong, and a great many things went startlingly, unexpectedly right. Thanks to Graham "Sky" Rowat, Mama and I got to go backstage last night after Guys and Dolls, which is something ...

Where marketers would never want to tamper

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Here's the thing: English professors don't usually get asked to test drive and review cars. I've reviewed books, grant proposals, even web sites. Never cars. Ah, this blessèd plot, this Internet. Granted, I'm not an "English professor" -- I have a Ph.D. in English literature, which means that I trained ...