More of those howlers:
...he may not be able to transgress his accumulation of knowledge...
Our overpopulation is a result of our indiscretion in spending.
The acceleration of progression is creeping along.
In economics, we hear a lot about planned adolescence.
They let their filth from our factories impregnate our lakes and rivers.
We live in a period of restless tranquillity.
Of course, everyone likes to see some blood split.
After all, we live in this doggy-dog world.
In the rat race of life, no one wants to be the ugly duckling
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Monday, May 27, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
On Love and Sex
More from the "howlers" folder:
Women are one of the habits man has learned to enjoy.
A man must sell insurance different from the way he sells his love.
He satirizes a virgin wrench.
I like to go steady, because then I am always ready if anything big comes up.
When a boy is deeply involved with a girl, it becomes necessary to motivate her.
We are plagued by the eroticism of the soil.
"I am newly married and the question that confronts me now is 'Should I wear my rah-rahs to school?'"
Pepys and his wife often enjoyed erotic dishes and often dined out.
How much fun will a housewife be on her second honeymoon if all she does is worry about her children.
Marriage consoling organizations are established by churches and cities in order to save marriages 'on the rocks'
Women are one of the habits man has learned to enjoy.
A man must sell insurance different from the way he sells his love.
He satirizes a virgin wrench.
I like to go steady, because then I am always ready if anything big comes up.
When a boy is deeply involved with a girl, it becomes necessary to motivate her.
We are plagued by the eroticism of the soil.
"I am newly married and the question that confronts me now is 'Should I wear my rah-rahs to school?'"
Pepys and his wife often enjoyed erotic dishes and often dined out.
How much fun will a housewife be on her second honeymoon if all she does is worry about her children.
Marriage consoling organizations are established by churches and cities in order to save marriages 'on the rocks'
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
The (Un)reasonable Man
More from the "Howlers" folder:
The reasonable man goes through life in a comma.
An unreasonable man is one who fertilizes the world.
Self-scented is the name for the unreasonable man.
An unreasonable man is always a temtuous lover.
Society, a group of unreasonable men, let minority groups be scrapecoats.
The unreasonable man spends his money wisely before he earns it.
The reasonable man goes through life in a comma.
An unreasonable man is one who fertilizes the world.
Self-scented is the name for the unreasonable man.
An unreasonable man is always a temtuous lover.
Society, a group of unreasonable men, let minority groups be scrapecoats.
The unreasonable man spends his money wisely before he earns it.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Howlers
My Sibling and I have been going through our father's papers with the intention of preparing them for archiving at his various universities. A folder entitled "Howlers" has surfaced. On literature:
The Rape of the Pope by Locke
Peachum is a downright scongrel.
Don Whan was a great lover.
Catch Her in the Rye
As the story opens, the heroin is seen...
Stephen discovers that Absalom has fathered an illegitimate child by the woman he married.
English took into its whore-house bed of words...
Life here can, as Shakespeare said, be compared to a baseball game.
I would agree with the author if he would only define is terms with my train of thought.
If it weren't for crime and violence, even the Bible would be reduced to a small pamphlet.
Stories of crime and violence take us away from the harsh realities of life.
The poem is a good example of the old carpet diem theme.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would have been dull if he had left out the stories.
Hamlet helps me to cathart.
The Rape of the Pope by Locke
Peachum is a downright scongrel.
Don Whan was a great lover.
Catch Her in the Rye
As the story opens, the heroin is seen...
Stephen discovers that Absalom has fathered an illegitimate child by the woman he married.
English took into its whore-house bed of words...
Life here can, as Shakespeare said, be compared to a baseball game.
I would agree with the author if he would only define is terms with my train of thought.
If it weren't for crime and violence, even the Bible would be reduced to a small pamphlet.
Stories of crime and violence take us away from the harsh realities of life.
The poem is a good example of the old carpet diem theme.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would have been dull if he had left out the stories.
Hamlet helps me to cathart.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Only Two American Literary Cultures?
In the recent article MFA vs NYC,Chad Harbach discusses what he sees as two distinct literary camps or directions in contemporary American fiction. (I link to a short version in Slate while the full version is in N+1.)
Harbach begins with a nod to Mark McGurl's 2009 study, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which analyzes the role of writing programs in postwar American fiction. McGurl's book posits that writing programs have "generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison" (that's from Amazon's product description; I have yet to read the book itself). I hope McGurl doesn't really claim that Nabokov was a product of American creative writing programs, but we'll let that pass.
Harbach himself argues that there exists a self-perpetuating MFA-writer culture centered on short stories written by MFA-grads and published in literary journals, and that the successful MFA-grad becomes a professor in yet another MFA program, thus permanently bypassing any need to earn a living by writing. This type of fiction writer lives in a different world, and publishes for a different audience, than what Harbach calls the NYC writer--the presumably equally serious fiction writer who publishes novels with mainstream New York publishers and (according to him) usually lives in New York.
Harbach doesn't really praise one camp over the other, and maybe that's not so surprising, as Harbach is an MFA-grad and an editor at the literary magazine N+1, yet now belongs to the NYC world as in February his first novel was sold at auction for "about $650,000." While the MFA writers are busy writing short stories that are read mainly by other MFA writers, the NYC writers are cranking out novels that must hook the reader on the first page or so and that the entire book-reading population must find easily digestible. On the other hand, the (few) most successful MFA-writer stories are anthologized repeatedly, whereas novels published by mainstream presses have a short lifespan these days. In other words, either route has its plusses and minuses. If you're a successful MFA writer, you have a secure income from your teaching and your stories appear in various journals read by writers scoping out whether those journals might publish them. If you're a successful NYC writer, you have an insecure income, but more people read you when you bring out a new book.
This neat binary doesn't, of course, entirely describe the world of fiction writers. It has nothing to say about commercial fiction, or about genre fiction of a more literary bent. Writers in those categories seem to live all over the US but either publish with mainstream NY presses or in small, independent, magazines.
As a writer who hasn't fit into any of these camps or categories, I'm not wild about how anything about the American literary world functions. I've published in the same literary journals as the MFA people (although it was probably harder for me back when the MFA world was gaga over dirty realism), and I've published in small genre magazines (although not much of my work qualifies as genre fiction). I write novels that aren't about New York and I've never wanted to live there. Furthermore, now I'm in the convenient position of making a living in academia without teaching in a writing program. This has the advantage of feeding my imagination in ways that don't involve a steady diet of student fiction, but the disadvantage that my job requires a lot of work, which takes time away from writing fiction. Well--while I'd like my fiction to count toward tenure, which it won't, I like having to think about other things academically.
Some writers prefer short fiction, others prefer novels. In the latter 20th century, novelists usually first published some short fiction as a means of developing skill, but they knew there was no longer any money in the short stuff. Today, in a literary world where novels published by established houses are supposed to make an immediate splash or die, there is almost an opposite pressure: a competent writer will find at least a few journals willing to take on the short fiction, but agents and publishers are no longer as open to novels that can't be hyped and rapidly sold to a fairly large public. Harbach seems to conclude that we should all write short fiction for one another, yet isn't that a rather odd conclusion from a writer who spent nine years writing his first novel and then had the good fortune to sell it for a big price? We are not all going to settle down to teach writing to undergrads who want "undemanding classes," and while I agree with him that being a professor is a cushy job in comparison to freelance copyediting (something we have both done for a living), he seems strangely unaware of how few people these days actually get tenure-track jobs.
Ah well. Back to my day's course-prep labors, so that I can feel free to write fiction tonight, or perhaps send out a few query letters.
Harbach begins with a nod to Mark McGurl's 2009 study, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which analyzes the role of writing programs in postwar American fiction. McGurl's book posits that writing programs have "generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison" (that's from Amazon's product description; I have yet to read the book itself). I hope McGurl doesn't really claim that Nabokov was a product of American creative writing programs, but we'll let that pass.
Harbach himself argues that there exists a self-perpetuating MFA-writer culture centered on short stories written by MFA-grads and published in literary journals, and that the successful MFA-grad becomes a professor in yet another MFA program, thus permanently bypassing any need to earn a living by writing. This type of fiction writer lives in a different world, and publishes for a different audience, than what Harbach calls the NYC writer--the presumably equally serious fiction writer who publishes novels with mainstream New York publishers and (according to him) usually lives in New York.
Harbach doesn't really praise one camp over the other, and maybe that's not so surprising, as Harbach is an MFA-grad and an editor at the literary magazine N+1, yet now belongs to the NYC world as in February his first novel was sold at auction for "about $650,000." While the MFA writers are busy writing short stories that are read mainly by other MFA writers, the NYC writers are cranking out novels that must hook the reader on the first page or so and that the entire book-reading population must find easily digestible. On the other hand, the (few) most successful MFA-writer stories are anthologized repeatedly, whereas novels published by mainstream presses have a short lifespan these days. In other words, either route has its plusses and minuses. If you're a successful MFA writer, you have a secure income from your teaching and your stories appear in various journals read by writers scoping out whether those journals might publish them. If you're a successful NYC writer, you have an insecure income, but more people read you when you bring out a new book.
This neat binary doesn't, of course, entirely describe the world of fiction writers. It has nothing to say about commercial fiction, or about genre fiction of a more literary bent. Writers in those categories seem to live all over the US but either publish with mainstream NY presses or in small, independent, magazines.
As a writer who hasn't fit into any of these camps or categories, I'm not wild about how anything about the American literary world functions. I've published in the same literary journals as the MFA people (although it was probably harder for me back when the MFA world was gaga over dirty realism), and I've published in small genre magazines (although not much of my work qualifies as genre fiction). I write novels that aren't about New York and I've never wanted to live there. Furthermore, now I'm in the convenient position of making a living in academia without teaching in a writing program. This has the advantage of feeding my imagination in ways that don't involve a steady diet of student fiction, but the disadvantage that my job requires a lot of work, which takes time away from writing fiction. Well--while I'd like my fiction to count toward tenure, which it won't, I like having to think about other things academically.
Some writers prefer short fiction, others prefer novels. In the latter 20th century, novelists usually first published some short fiction as a means of developing skill, but they knew there was no longer any money in the short stuff. Today, in a literary world where novels published by established houses are supposed to make an immediate splash or die, there is almost an opposite pressure: a competent writer will find at least a few journals willing to take on the short fiction, but agents and publishers are no longer as open to novels that can't be hyped and rapidly sold to a fairly large public. Harbach seems to conclude that we should all write short fiction for one another, yet isn't that a rather odd conclusion from a writer who spent nine years writing his first novel and then had the good fortune to sell it for a big price? We are not all going to settle down to teach writing to undergrads who want "undemanding classes," and while I agree with him that being a professor is a cushy job in comparison to freelance copyediting (something we have both done for a living), he seems strangely unaware of how few people these days actually get tenure-track jobs.
Ah well. Back to my day's course-prep labors, so that I can feel free to write fiction tonight, or perhaps send out a few query letters.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Publish, Perish, or ....?
This just came in the mail. Looks like a step in the right direction. Since when does quantity equal quality?
ERIH and Art History - a joint resolution of RIHA
RIHA, the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, sharply criticizes the clandestine way in which the European Science Foundation (ESF) has developed and monitored the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) since 2001, and is extremely concerned about its present and future application.
See:
http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/erih-european-reference-index-for-the-humanities/erih-initial-lists.html
Following discussions at the General Assemblies in Rome (Nov. 6-8, 2008) and Ljubljana (Nov. 6-7, 2009), RIHA has adopted the following resolution on November 7, 2009:
1. The qualities of scholarly work in the humanities cannot be assessed in simple numbers or metrics; principles which were developed in the context of the natural sciences cannot be transferred to or employed in the humanities, since these work differently, in particular with regard to the relevance of research for different audiences or readerships, and its impact on these constituencies.
2. RIHA strongly opposes the idea that, in the field of art history, the place of a publication (in a journal that has been assigned to category A, B, or C) is indicative of the quality of the individual article or contribution.
3. The categorization of journals does not reflect the needs of scholars. RIHA will not deliver data to ERIH or to any similar quantitative indices of research quality that can be used for assessing the quality of individual scholars, departments, or institutions.
4. RIHA strongly opposes the idea that a specific number of articles in any journal can serve as a means to establish the scholarly potential of a candidate for career promotion (as practised, e.g., in Poland).
5. RIHA strongly deplores the current practice of linking directly the funding of a research institute to the number of articles published by the staff of that institute. RIHA considers this practice to be meaningless with regard to the quality and impact of an institute's daily work.
6. All RIHA member institutes hereby declare that they will never use ERIH data for assessing the quality of applications for grants and fellowships, research projects, or for temporary or permanent positions as staff members. Rather, they will rely on specific criteria appropriate to the individual case.
7. RIHA strongly urges all European art historical institutions (museums, galleries, universities, cultural heritage organizations etc.) not to use ERIH, and to lobby their respective ministries to ensure that ERIH is not employed at local, regional, federal, or national level.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Revising the Dissertation
Publishers want my dissertation. They've told me so. But of course that doesn't mean they want it as is; the more well-regarded of them want it fixed up. There haven't been any specifics on this, but I know they want the footnotes trimmed, the literature review (which I didn't want to write anyway) trimmed or excised, the title improved, and all that sort of thing. And the book proposal has to be finished up and then (like a basic grant proposal) recreated in several different formats to suit the various publishers to whom I will submit it.
Exactly when I'm going to do all this when teaching full time and preparing new classes, I don't know, but pretty much everyone with a new PhD and a job has that problem.
I'm not sure my dissertation needs huge amounts of revision, but whatever it does need is bound to seem huge to me. With all that in mind, I took a look at William Germano's From Dissertation to Book.
As with any how-to or self-help book, the question facing me as a reader was "What brilliantly useful bit(s) can I glean from this? Will there be anything that just rockets me forward?" It really only takes one of those tidbits for a book of this kind to be worthwhile. But unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case may be, I'm already rather familiar with writing and publishing. It's not easy to give me the pleasant surprise of "that's just what I needed to know." All through the first half of the book, I kept muttering "Get to the revision." That first half was full of information and counseling that I'm sure a great many people need, but which for me were bloody obvious. Germano doesn't get going on actual pointers for revision until halfway through, but that wasn't really clear until I got there. After all, you never know where some informational gem might be hidden. I might not know as much as I think I do.
Germano has useful tips on coming up with a new title (something I had already done, at least provisionally); on subheading the chapters (sections with subheads had been a big help from a book on writing the dissertation itself, but my subhead titles will benefit from the Germano touch, as will the chapter titles themselves); and while people generally think I write well, I was decidedly charmed by Germano's advice not too quote too liberally from authors whose prose style is far better than one's own. "Strong writers, like strong perfume," says Germano after throwing a fine chunk of M. F. K. Fisher our way, "should be used with great care. Comparison with your own prose will be inevitable." Indeed. I like to think I have a pretty good prose style, but its best examples are not to be found in everything I write. You are not finding my best style in this blog post, nor will you find it in most of my dissertation, despite the compliments I have had on the latter.
The overuse of the passive voice is not, I think, one of my major sins, but I very much like it when Germano says "Some passives we're glad we haven't had to see:
Yep.
Exactly when I'm going to do all this when teaching full time and preparing new classes, I don't know, but pretty much everyone with a new PhD and a job has that problem.
I'm not sure my dissertation needs huge amounts of revision, but whatever it does need is bound to seem huge to me. With all that in mind, I took a look at William Germano's From Dissertation to Book.
As with any how-to or self-help book, the question facing me as a reader was "What brilliantly useful bit(s) can I glean from this? Will there be anything that just rockets me forward?" It really only takes one of those tidbits for a book of this kind to be worthwhile. But unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case may be, I'm already rather familiar with writing and publishing. It's not easy to give me the pleasant surprise of "that's just what I needed to know." All through the first half of the book, I kept muttering "Get to the revision." That first half was full of information and counseling that I'm sure a great many people need, but which for me were bloody obvious. Germano doesn't get going on actual pointers for revision until halfway through, but that wasn't really clear until I got there. After all, you never know where some informational gem might be hidden. I might not know as much as I think I do.
Germano has useful tips on coming up with a new title (something I had already done, at least provisionally); on subheading the chapters (sections with subheads had been a big help from a book on writing the dissertation itself, but my subhead titles will benefit from the Germano touch, as will the chapter titles themselves); and while people generally think I write well, I was decidedly charmed by Germano's advice not too quote too liberally from authors whose prose style is far better than one's own. "Strong writers, like strong perfume," says Germano after throwing a fine chunk of M. F. K. Fisher our way, "should be used with great care. Comparison with your own prose will be inevitable." Indeed. I like to think I have a pretty good prose style, but its best examples are not to be found in everything I write. You are not finding my best style in this blog post, nor will you find it in most of my dissertation, despite the compliments I have had on the latter.
The overuse of the passive voice is not, I think, one of my major sins, but I very much like it when Germano says "Some passives we're glad we haven't had to see:
In the beginning the heavens and the earth were created by God.
Arms and the man are being sung by me.
Ishmael is what I'm called."
Yep.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Online Catalogs and their Peculiarities
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at problems in online library catalog databases and some efforts to fix them.
This is a topic of ongoing interest to me, but I can't say I think the article addresses the problem with sufficient depth, and the comments on the article suggest that I am not alone in thinking so.
We're presented with a specific case: a grad student gets poor and frustrating results when using University of Virginia's Virgo catalog. We aren't told what the Virgo search options are or where in the interface the student typed "Thomas Jefferson." We are told, however, that new and better software is taking over.
I haven't used Virgo, so I don't know how it's set up. But I've used Melvyl, Gladis, PittCat, PittCat+, Library of Congress, WorldCat (and is this or is this not the same as OCLC?), and various other library databases in the US, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain. I'm not a librarian and I don't consider myself an expert on library software, but we could say I have some experience in using and getting used to different catalogs.
In most catalog software I've used, the user chooses whether to put "Thomas Jefferson" into search fields such as author, title, or keyword. This is usually but not always pretty effective. Things aren't always properly catalogued. For instance, when I returned from the Czech Republic, I spent a lot of time looking for materials at UC Berkeley--generally books for which I had full bibliographic data. I was surprised to discover that often the library didn't appear to have a book when I searched by title, but that an author search would bring the book right up. I think the reverse was also true, and that sometimes it was more productive to locate Berkeley books using Melvyl, even though I'd normally Melvyl to see if any library in the UC system (within easy driving distance) had a book.
Some of the new catalog software, however, has you just type in "Thomas Jefferson" without specifying whether you want books by him, about him, with his name mentioned in the keywords, or with his name in some other random location. University of Pittsburgh's new PittCat+ does this, forcing the searcher to spend absurd amounts of time winnowing down the categories to find him as a subject. When I first saw PittCat+, I thought I would like it because it does allow you to narrow the search in ways that I had seen on OCLC, but I rapidly concluded that since you can't start with a focused search as in PittCat "Classic", PittCat+ simply wastes the user's time. This was a complaint I heard repeatedly from librarians and faculty. We learned rapidly that PittCat "Classic," with all its faults, was way quicker and easier to use than its replacement.
I've heard people argue that Google-style searching is the new direction for library catalogs, and I've heard people decry it. Well, surely it should be possible to have both Google-style searching (useful for fairly obscure things) and more focused initial searches. After all, if you want books about Thomas Jefferson, the problem is more likely to be how to narrow down the search, since there must be a plethora of books dealing with various aspects of Jefferson--biographies, histories, political studies, works on plantations and slavery, etc.
One of the people to comment on the Chronicle article argued that what we really need is a return to Library of Congress headings. He or she apparently taught these headings for years and imagines that they are easily learned. I beg to differ. I wouldn't say Library of Congress headings are useless, but back in the early days of online catalogs, I tried searching with them, since in those days UC Berkeley's online catalog used them (maybe it still does, in some hidden place). I'd dig around in the big red books, trying to figure out where in the hierarchy my topic might be. I understood the concept of hierarchy, but--not having taken the commenter's class--I found it impossible to guess which aspect of a topic might be higher on the hierarchy. If I had wanted to look for Czech art, for example, I would have been uncertain whether Czech, Czechoslovakia (this was before the Czech Republic existed), or art would start the string. Fortunately Boolean searches pretty much wiped out that problem. Not that Boolean searches are always simple, but the basics of Boolean searching are easy. Czech and art, or Czechoslovakia and art.
I haven't yet familiarized myself with the catalog here, but I've already had one disturbing experience with it. I wanted to put a volume of the commonly used anthology Art in Theory on reserve for one of my classes. I searched for the title Art in Theory and was shocked to find that apparently the library didn't own any of the three volumes. I therefore (after scanning the pages needed and posting them online) requested that the library order the series. To my great surprise, yesterday I got an email saying that we do actually own the volume in question (apparently not the other two) and that it has been put on reserve for my class. Well, I'd like to know where this book was hiding in the catalog.
This is a topic of ongoing interest to me, but I can't say I think the article addresses the problem with sufficient depth, and the comments on the article suggest that I am not alone in thinking so.
We're presented with a specific case: a grad student gets poor and frustrating results when using University of Virginia's Virgo catalog. We aren't told what the Virgo search options are or where in the interface the student typed "Thomas Jefferson." We are told, however, that new and better software is taking over.
I haven't used Virgo, so I don't know how it's set up. But I've used Melvyl, Gladis, PittCat, PittCat+, Library of Congress, WorldCat (and is this or is this not the same as OCLC?), and various other library databases in the US, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain. I'm not a librarian and I don't consider myself an expert on library software, but we could say I have some experience in using and getting used to different catalogs.
In most catalog software I've used, the user chooses whether to put "Thomas Jefferson" into search fields such as author, title, or keyword. This is usually but not always pretty effective. Things aren't always properly catalogued. For instance, when I returned from the Czech Republic, I spent a lot of time looking for materials at UC Berkeley--generally books for which I had full bibliographic data. I was surprised to discover that often the library didn't appear to have a book when I searched by title, but that an author search would bring the book right up. I think the reverse was also true, and that sometimes it was more productive to locate Berkeley books using Melvyl, even though I'd normally Melvyl to see if any library in the UC system (within easy driving distance) had a book.
Some of the new catalog software, however, has you just type in "Thomas Jefferson" without specifying whether you want books by him, about him, with his name mentioned in the keywords, or with his name in some other random location. University of Pittsburgh's new PittCat+ does this, forcing the searcher to spend absurd amounts of time winnowing down the categories to find him as a subject. When I first saw PittCat+, I thought I would like it because it does allow you to narrow the search in ways that I had seen on OCLC, but I rapidly concluded that since you can't start with a focused search as in PittCat "Classic", PittCat+ simply wastes the user's time. This was a complaint I heard repeatedly from librarians and faculty. We learned rapidly that PittCat "Classic," with all its faults, was way quicker and easier to use than its replacement.
I've heard people argue that Google-style searching is the new direction for library catalogs, and I've heard people decry it. Well, surely it should be possible to have both Google-style searching (useful for fairly obscure things) and more focused initial searches. After all, if you want books about Thomas Jefferson, the problem is more likely to be how to narrow down the search, since there must be a plethora of books dealing with various aspects of Jefferson--biographies, histories, political studies, works on plantations and slavery, etc.
One of the people to comment on the Chronicle article argued that what we really need is a return to Library of Congress headings. He or she apparently taught these headings for years and imagines that they are easily learned. I beg to differ. I wouldn't say Library of Congress headings are useless, but back in the early days of online catalogs, I tried searching with them, since in those days UC Berkeley's online catalog used them (maybe it still does, in some hidden place). I'd dig around in the big red books, trying to figure out where in the hierarchy my topic might be. I understood the concept of hierarchy, but--not having taken the commenter's class--I found it impossible to guess which aspect of a topic might be higher on the hierarchy. If I had wanted to look for Czech art, for example, I would have been uncertain whether Czech, Czechoslovakia (this was before the Czech Republic existed), or art would start the string. Fortunately Boolean searches pretty much wiped out that problem. Not that Boolean searches are always simple, but the basics of Boolean searching are easy. Czech and art, or Czechoslovakia and art.
I haven't yet familiarized myself with the catalog here, but I've already had one disturbing experience with it. I wanted to put a volume of the commonly used anthology Art in Theory on reserve for one of my classes. I searched for the title Art in Theory and was shocked to find that apparently the library didn't own any of the three volumes. I therefore (after scanning the pages needed and posting them online) requested that the library order the series. To my great surprise, yesterday I got an email saying that we do actually own the volume in question (apparently not the other two) and that it has been put on reserve for my class. Well, I'd like to know where this book was hiding in the catalog.
Friday, September 18, 2009
And Now for a Moment of Tetchiness
On the whole, I am settling into my new teaching situation without any real trouble. Faculty and staff have been generally welcoming, and my students (so far as I can tell thus far) are pleasant and friendly, with some good observations to offer in the classroom.
On the other hand, I am disconcerted to receive a small onslaught of student emails that do not really bode well.
For example, a student who apologizes for missing class due to taking care of alleged administrative hassles inquires "Is there anything I missed?" This is the kind of query that tempts me to respond "No, I don't bother to lecture when you aren't there."
Another student asks "Since I missed today, I was wondering if we have any assignments due next week?" While it is better to ask than to miss out, the syllabus does reveal that there is a paper due next week.
Somewhat in the same vein is the question "what is the name of the paper we have to read and where can I find it also do we have to write a feed back to the paper and if so how any pages?" All of this information is on the course website, which is also where the syllabus can be found since (as a cost-cutting measure) we are not supposed to hand out paper syllabi and assignments. For that matter, I did talk about next week's paper yesterday in class.
Finally, another student apologizes for tardiness due to problems in the preceding class, and regrets that telling me so after class would have caused further tardiness. Since it is only the second week of class, I have certainly not learned to match everyone's name and face yet, nor do I notice everyone who slips into a dark classroom late; thus it is essential for me to know who actually showed up so that I do not wrongly penalize lateness as absence; hey, handing me a simple note after class would do the trick if I am (improbably) surrounded by eager students.
It's true that I prefer students to ask even somewhat foolish questions than be too shy or easily embarrassed to ask a question at all, but it would be nice if they thought a bit, too.
On the other hand, I am disconcerted to receive a small onslaught of student emails that do not really bode well.
For example, a student who apologizes for missing class due to taking care of alleged administrative hassles inquires "Is there anything I missed?" This is the kind of query that tempts me to respond "No, I don't bother to lecture when you aren't there."
Another student asks "Since I missed today, I was wondering if we have any assignments due next week?" While it is better to ask than to miss out, the syllabus does reveal that there is a paper due next week.
Somewhat in the same vein is the question "what is the name of the paper we have to read and where can I find it also do we have to write a feed back to the paper and if so how any pages?" All of this information is on the course website, which is also where the syllabus can be found since (as a cost-cutting measure) we are not supposed to hand out paper syllabi and assignments. For that matter, I did talk about next week's paper yesterday in class.
Finally, another student apologizes for tardiness due to problems in the preceding class, and regrets that telling me so after class would have caused further tardiness. Since it is only the second week of class, I have certainly not learned to match everyone's name and face yet, nor do I notice everyone who slips into a dark classroom late; thus it is essential for me to know who actually showed up so that I do not wrongly penalize lateness as absence; hey, handing me a simple note after class would do the trick if I am (improbably) surrounded by eager students.
It's true that I prefer students to ask even somewhat foolish questions than be too shy or easily embarrassed to ask a question at all, but it would be nice if they thought a bit, too.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Antioch College Revived?
Antioch College, one of the most venerable non-traditional liberal arts colleges in the US, closed awhile back for (what else?) financial reasons, but it looks as though the school could reopen.
It would be a pretty neat if they can pull this off.
It would be a pretty neat if they can pull this off.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Academic Discussions
An article in today's online Chronicle of Higher Education asks whether academic e-mail lists, notably those hosted by H-Net, are moribund. Some scholars claim that blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are taking their place.
As a scholar who's used all of these except Twitter (and I'm not a stranger to Twitter, I just don't use it), my reaction was that this was ridiculous. Why?
Blogs, due to the flexibility of the form, have an important place (or should) in the scholarly world. Individuals and groups blog on a wide variety of topics. On the other hand, I think few people really want to keep track of more than about ten active blogs. Sure, you can read your blogs via a feed, but the more blogs you track, the less likely you are to notice that any individual blog has a new post. The feed doesn't show the discussion that a post has prompted, either.
Facebook is good for keeping track of friends, and some academic exchange does take place, but the scholarly is easily lost amid the more social material. More significantly, to post something of any length on Facebook, you have to put it in a Note, and comments of any significant length have to go in other Notes because the comment field only allows a certain number of characters (I'm not sure how many, but it's not a lot). Besides, while you can group your contacts within Facebook, there isn't really any good way of separating academe from everything else. I know there are some ways around this--one person I know has a Facebook identity for use with friends and a separate one for use with students, but since many of his friends are also colleagues, I think many of the links get posted in both places.
Twitter seems particularly unsuited to take over. With a 140-character limit to each Twitter message, that's a medium with severe limitations. You can broadcast your headline news with it, but how much humanities discussion is something you want to read in capsule form?
Thus, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter all have their uses, but their uses are rather different from the uses of listservs. I think I subscribe to about six academic lists, plus a shifting number of lists relating to software and other topics, which can get me up to something like twenty simultaneous lists at times. Obviously I don't read all of these messages, and I certainly don't read them all right when they arrive. But there they are, I've got them, and the ones I don't delete are categorizable and searchable. In one of those moments of semi-brain-deadness, I can go through a batch of art history or Slavic emails and see what's happening.
This, however, gets to one of the other points made in the Chronicle piece. While listservs are great for disseminating conference announcements, job postings, and book reviews, their use as a means of actual discussion has dwindled.
The amount of discussion depends on the list, though, and this has a lot to do with the number of subscribers. Too few subscribers, and the list has nothing to say; too many, and it gets noisy until people either unsubscribe or turn it into an announcement-only list. H-ArtHist has no discussion that I can see, just announcements, most of which are of no particular interest to me. This is not surprising, considering the list tries to cover the entire field, internationally. The likelihood of my hopping on a plane at the last minute to attend tomorrow's German symposium on (I'm making this up) dog iconography in 15th century Japan is pretty small. But other lists do have discussion, particularly about books people have read or want to read. H-HistSex has pretty good discussion (as it ought to!) and often H-Women does as well. Not endless discussion, but readable.
I'm not sure how the question of scholarly discussion should be resolved. The historians have the benefit of all the littler special-interest lists, which can sustain some specific discussions, but as far as I can tell, the art historians are pretty much stuck with one non-discussion list. HGCEA sends out email to its members, but I wouldn't call that a discussion list. Likewise AAH. But perhaps I'm missing something.
Where are all those art-history discussions, anyway?
As a scholar who's used all of these except Twitter (and I'm not a stranger to Twitter, I just don't use it), my reaction was that this was ridiculous. Why?
Blogs, due to the flexibility of the form, have an important place (or should) in the scholarly world. Individuals and groups blog on a wide variety of topics. On the other hand, I think few people really want to keep track of more than about ten active blogs. Sure, you can read your blogs via a feed, but the more blogs you track, the less likely you are to notice that any individual blog has a new post. The feed doesn't show the discussion that a post has prompted, either.
Facebook is good for keeping track of friends, and some academic exchange does take place, but the scholarly is easily lost amid the more social material. More significantly, to post something of any length on Facebook, you have to put it in a Note, and comments of any significant length have to go in other Notes because the comment field only allows a certain number of characters (I'm not sure how many, but it's not a lot). Besides, while you can group your contacts within Facebook, there isn't really any good way of separating academe from everything else. I know there are some ways around this--one person I know has a Facebook identity for use with friends and a separate one for use with students, but since many of his friends are also colleagues, I think many of the links get posted in both places.
Twitter seems particularly unsuited to take over. With a 140-character limit to each Twitter message, that's a medium with severe limitations. You can broadcast your headline news with it, but how much humanities discussion is something you want to read in capsule form?
Thus, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter all have their uses, but their uses are rather different from the uses of listservs. I think I subscribe to about six academic lists, plus a shifting number of lists relating to software and other topics, which can get me up to something like twenty simultaneous lists at times. Obviously I don't read all of these messages, and I certainly don't read them all right when they arrive. But there they are, I've got them, and the ones I don't delete are categorizable and searchable. In one of those moments of semi-brain-deadness, I can go through a batch of art history or Slavic emails and see what's happening.
This, however, gets to one of the other points made in the Chronicle piece. While listservs are great for disseminating conference announcements, job postings, and book reviews, their use as a means of actual discussion has dwindled.
The amount of discussion depends on the list, though, and this has a lot to do with the number of subscribers. Too few subscribers, and the list has nothing to say; too many, and it gets noisy until people either unsubscribe or turn it into an announcement-only list. H-ArtHist has no discussion that I can see, just announcements, most of which are of no particular interest to me. This is not surprising, considering the list tries to cover the entire field, internationally. The likelihood of my hopping on a plane at the last minute to attend tomorrow's German symposium on (I'm making this up) dog iconography in 15th century Japan is pretty small. But other lists do have discussion, particularly about books people have read or want to read. H-HistSex has pretty good discussion (as it ought to!) and often H-Women does as well. Not endless discussion, but readable.
I'm not sure how the question of scholarly discussion should be resolved. The historians have the benefit of all the littler special-interest lists, which can sustain some specific discussions, but as far as I can tell, the art historians are pretty much stuck with one non-discussion list. HGCEA sends out email to its members, but I wouldn't call that a discussion list. Likewise AAH. But perhaps I'm missing something.
Where are all those art-history discussions, anyway?
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