The Classification Essay: what happened

This is one instance that makes me wish I had a larger class, just to have a greater range of students. On the first day, when I gave the assignment out, one student stopped afterwards to say how excited he was, that he'd read some Aristotle in a previous class, and had all sorts of ideas about what he might do. Then he dropped, but my sense was that his excitement was genuine. When I posted the assignment on Facebook, it got an energetic response from academic colleagues, but more than that -- it seemed like wherever I went that week, other friends outside of the academy said that they'd been thinking about it. In church on Sunday, the homily referenced sorting things, and one of the other choir members turned around and said that she'd been thinking about it all week.

I think I explained in my previous post that this was an assignment that I gave with little accompanying prep, other than the detailed instructions and rubric. If I had paired it with readings, they'd have been from Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, but I thought that if I gave the students a run-through of the various systems of classification, that it'd be enough to get them going. What I introduced were examples of binary classifications, materialist classifications, systems centered around a particular type of object (i.e., books -- so, Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress), and systems ranking a specific quality (biggest, best, scariest, etc.)

This assignment was intended to show me what they could do: I was not expecting perfect results. The students were aware of the fact that though I would fill out the rubric in determining what their formal grade might have been, that they would get full points for completing the homework. I wanted them to see how I approached grading.

I would call the results mixed. Rather than devise an original system of classification, the majority framed their essays around the question of what to take with them if their home was on fire. One student wrote about the system of organization dictated by a particular type of residence, and one classified only one particular set of objects -- the equivalent of baseball cards. One thing I didn't ask them to address is functionality. If they were developing the system because the Singularity had occurred, or if constraints on space (because of flooding, population growth, etc.) had made it necessary for possessions to be uploaded to the web, could they devise a system that they could use to retrieve things? Would that have made the stakes of the classification system more clear? Maybe, but maybe not. No one in the class has much of a web presence, other than on Facebook, so sorting and tagging is pretty new to them.

Because I could respond with specific questions about the choices they'd made, and because there were motions and starts of useful insights and questions, I think the assignment was at least partially successful. One of my primary goals in assigning it was to learn something about the students' personalities and writing styles, and I also think it was effective in that regard.

However, I'm not sure that the assignment itself was especially useful as the students responded to the question. Classifying possessions according to the "what would you take out of a burning building?" question is the equivalent of coasting; and I specifically asked students to devise a system, rather than write about the one that they'd always used. The point (as I intended it) was for them to create a system, rather than simply describe a conventional question or sorting mechanism -- the idea being that arranging things differently would make them consider their property in a new light; and also think about organization and classification as activities that are part of everyday life -- not just part of academic essay writing.

Preliminary findings:

I think I gave out this assignment too soon, and fumbled it in wanting it both to be a personal essay, and an analytical one. Without doing at least a little more reading in the genre of political theory, the significance of classification -- and its relationship to politics -- doesn't come through. It's too foreign a question for students to answer in the way that I hoped they would. I should have started by asking students to write about what mine did write about: their stuff, and how they organize it (or don't) right now -- and then, I should have asked them to think about how to develop an original system of classification. I probably should also have streamlined the assignment sheet. In trying to make things clear, what I achieved was clutter.

That doesn't mean that the assignment can't work. At least, I don't think it does. I remain committed to the idea of an assignment that can be both personal and analytical. Two articles in Inside Higher Ed, by Dan Berrett and Barbara Fister only make me more certain that it's worth experimenting with this further. To summarize, (though both are worth reading in their entirety), Berrett describes the findings of the Citation Project: that students copy chunks of texts and use them in their papers without a solid understanding of the quotes' relation to their originary texts, or the underlying arguments and contexts. Fister looks at various findings discussed at the 4Cs conference, and the energy that she sees students bringing to writing outside of academic contexts -- in "everyday research" -- and argues that the way forward is to "abandon the traditional research paper," at least for students who are inexperienced with academic work.

What I'm doing next:

I think there's got to be a useful way of building on this assignment. It didn't work perfectly -- but despite that, my sense is that the students liked writing about their stuff, and what's important to them.

The question is, how do I turn the classification paper into an assignment that also helps my students engage with Locke, and Marx in detailed ways; and with the specific subject of political theory?

I'm not going to try to do this immediately, especially because I'm planning to hand out the second essay sequence on Thursday of this week, and I have a prompt question that, while fairly traditional, is a question that any student in political science, and especially in political theory, needs to consider.

I would like to make a revision and expansion of the classification essay my third essay sequence for the quarter, and in that sequence, I'd like to ask students to develop a system of classification for their possessions according to Locke's principles in the Second Treatise of Government or Marx & Engels' in the Communist Manifesto, and to explain their rationale for categories; and to describe how their classification alters the meaning of their property. I'd like to do this partly because both Locke and M&E are writing materialist arguments. This isn't just my view; it's also the way that the lecturer is presenting them. It makes sense to me to develop a way into them through property. It also makes sense to me to attempt to find a more personal, and more concrete, way of asking students to engage with Marx. I've taught the Manifesto before, so I know, that could backfire -- I think it might if I didn't emphasize personal and concrete.

I anticipate that completing this assignment will involve thinking about 1) what defines ownership, and different types of ownership, 2) objects that facilitate their participation in the political sphere, or public life, as opposed to private life, 3) objects for which the use is governed by law, or which is regulated or dependent upon higher powers (Comcast, Amazon, Apple), 4) objects that can be said to increase power, (depending on how power is defined), 5) objects which are both concrete, and abstract. These are what occur to me today, as I consider this.

I'm certainly thinking about the texts when I name those five areas of thought, but more than that, I'm thinking that this assignment would prompt students to determine what ideas and principles their chosen author prioritizes and why (in order to determine what their classification style should be); and how those priorities advance an argument (i.e., what are the results of organizing life according to these priorities). I'm also planning to encourage them to think about what sort of scheme of organization the authors themselves use; and what they're trying to represent by adapting that scheme. Most of all, I'm hoping to find ways to build bridges between the abstract and the concrete, and back again.

If you have questions or comments, or critiques regarding this assignment (both the original form, and what I'm planning to do next), I would not only welcome them, but would be grateful for them. So, most likely, will my students.

* But is this an artificiality that is a good part of academic work? Or is it pernicious navelgazing?

In which I attempt to catch up, at least on blogging about teaching

I'm finally coming out of the most ghastly bronchitis bug that I've tangled with since my sophomore year of college. 16 days, and I'm still dealing with a lingering cough, altered voice, and an inability to function in polite company without Kleenex handy.

I've never been so ill at the start of a quarter, and so it's both a blessing and a curse that I've ended up teaching a writing course linked with a political theory course, and which has only 5 students in it. (The writing links were underenrolled, and my section was the earlier of the two offered, and the professor teaching the poli sci course emphasized how hard the writing load would be. I can't say I'm surprised that some students shied away from both his class and mine, since we both have separate essay assignments (even if they are oriented towards the same readings).

I planned a number of things for this quarter: perhaps most importantly, a course website, and the intention of having the students blog throughout the quarter. In the past, I've had them use Catalyst GoPost, and I'll say up front that I haven't been all that smart about how I used it -- both in terms of thinking about making it a mini-knowledge site; and in terms of creating useful and specific assignments for the students. Instead, I wanted them to respond to each lecture, and A) that's too much, and B) it's not effectively goal-oriented -- so it didn't succeed in creating a genuine conversation between my classroom and the lecture classroom.

This time, I used and added to several of the blog assignments linked to in this Profhacker post; and used a rubric. I've encouraged the students to use the blog in the way that helps them -- i.e., as a space to talk about the more formal writing assignments, and as a space to apply the political theory texts that they're reading to current events, or other situations as they see fit. The rubric still dictates that they have to display a high level of engagement with the text, but I'm hoping that the blog will give them the space to engage with Aristotle, Locke, etc., in multiple ways (which they are explicitly not encouraged to do in the formal essays for either the lecture course, or mine.

In my case (and I suspect in the POLS professor's, too, but I can't speak for him), it's not that those alternative methods of engaging with a text aren't valid, but just that the focus of the course is to have them practice a very specific style of essay writing that is widely demanded in academia, and in poli sci specifically. I explained that. Rather than have them write texts that were supposed to be about practicing academic writing, and which I would have to constantly nudge them back towards more focus and seriousness, I'd much rather say that the blog is a space where they have more freedom, and that their goal is to demonstrate a range of engagements with the course subject matter.

I'm doing everything I can to make the course website a good knowledge site as well -- posting answers to questions that I get asked each quarter; posting links to sites like Memidex and Natural Readers under a writing hacks tag. I only have two so far; I need more, but I think if I keep posting steadily, that part of the site will get better and better.


I've asked the students to tag their posts (in fact, I've made it a requirement for them to get credit). None of them had blogged before, so I wanted to avoid overloading them with new tech, but I did want the site to be a useful tool, in some way other than merely making it searchable. So far, it's working. The first week, only 3/5 students posted in time to get points, and I had to remind them all to tag their posts. This week, they all posted on time, and I didn't have to do any reminding about tagging.

But I don't like asking students to do random stuff, so I'm trying to make tagging and classification a major subtext of the class. That's where my personal property classification assignment comes in. To give credit where credit is due, it was inspired by a comment by Johanna Drucker, who said that she asks students to develop such a system in her classes -- but that was all she said, and I didn't get a chance to ask her more.

I wanted to develop it for use with political theory partly as an interesting personal essay (more interesting than the literary autobiography that I've used in the past with comp classes), and as an introduction to the idea that classification is an inherently political act (whether arbitrary, material, or any one of numerous binary organizations), and suggest that thinking about texts in terms of the authors' classification schemes is a useful way of making heavy content more clear, and breaking it into manageable chunks.

I also really wanted to have the students develop something that was their own thinking, but was not a traditional argument.

The essays have been turned in, and I'll look at them tomorrow, and report back in terms of what I've got. I think that classification is helpful in terms of reading texts, but it's a little hard to say. The Nicomachean Ethics are hard no matter what you do with them; and I think that it'll take a little while for classification as reading to catch on (and no doubt, I can learn to teach it more effectively) -- but I'm excited to keep working on that.

And today, Susan Brown, of the Orlando Project, visited and gave a wonderful, 2-hour demo of the textbase, and then, after less than an hour's break, another talk(!), and I probably don't need to tell you, but I will anyways, how exciting it was to read the scholarly introduction, and see the following statement, and feel like I'd made exactly the write choice in deciding to work on foregrounding classification in this course, and in future courses:

We observe simply that while the work of recovery made a broader literary history both newly possible and newly necessary, the unanswered criticisms of the genre contributed to the continued absence of integrating histories of women's writing, or of revised general histories that take women's writing into account.

But the Orlando Project, and why it's important to me, deserve a whole separate post, and I think I need to save it for later this weekend.

Using Twitter at #sts11, and at academic conferences in general

On the last day of the conference, Barbara Bordalejo was gleefully tweeting about showing Twitter to Paul Eggert and Peter Shillingsburg, and then Marta Werner, which is excellent — I wish I’d thought of showing them myself, because they’ve certainly all shown me amazing things, and it would be only courteous to return the favor. But I can still do that. This post, then, is written for an audience who haven’t used Twitter before (at all, or who use it, but not within a conference.) It’s long, but broken up into sections; read one, or all, as you like. I want to avoid asserting baldly that everyone should be on Twitter when they attend a conference. Different styles work best for different people. But if you're curious about it, then this post may be useful to you.

Tweeting to promote, and document
Tweeting to interact
Twitter can make conferences more professionally useful
Too big to tweet: Peter Shillingsburg’s Presidential Address
Twitter and conflict; or, Twitter isn’t enough — but sometimes, neither is spoken discussion.
Tweeting in a textual context
But can’t you get ADHD from Twitter?
What I don't know

Tweeting to promote and document

This was my first time tweeting at a formal conference (as opposed to at a THATCamp); which meant I had to figure out what I wanted to say. At the first session I attended on Wednesday afternoon, How to Do Things with NINES, there were only 3 people, including me, and tweeting wasn’t especially conducive to interacting fully with them; but I did send out a couple of messages describing what we were doing; knowing that people in the other sessions would be doing the same. And Typewright, which we ended up discussing as much or more as NINES itself, is worthy of more buzz: it’s a tool for crowdsourcing OCR correction in databases like ECCO, and one of the most exciting features of it is that once a user has corrected a full text, Gale will give him/her the rights to it. (My podcast scholarly edition, which I spoke about at MLA 2009, languishing in part precisely because of rights issues), should finally become a reality, once Typewright goes live).

On the chance that other people hadn’t heard about Typewright I wanted it to become part of the #sts11 tweetstream; and also briefly think, publicly, about how users might be credited/identified with their work. (The creators haven’t decided how the attribution system will work, and there are still issues with Typewright to be worked out — for example, what if some lines are partially corrected, but not fully? How will their status be recorded in the system? One of the lines we looked at had a word with an ink blot at the beginning, and as far as we could tell, it said “bish’d” — so though that line has been mostly fixed, it isn’t entirely legible.) Andy Stauffer is excited about the potential of using Typewright in the classroom, and so am I, but I’m also excited about it as a potential gateway drug for more intense work using digital tools. It’s simple enough that it should feel accessible to scholars who are leery of using a computer for anything more than word processing, it’s accompanied by definite rewards in the form of the textual rights (though I wonder how much people will be motivated to work on editions of Pamela and/or Clarissa.

I also want to know what happens once an edition has been corrected. Once someone’s claimed the first edition of Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” by correcting it, will it no longer be possible for anyone else to do the same thing? What if I find that someone has corrected half of a pamphlet, and I finish up the other half? Do I have to make a distinct change in every line, or only click the button to show that I’ve reviewed it and it’s correct?

Enough about Typewright, for the moment — back to tweeting.

Tweeting to interact

In the panels themselves, I tweeted to describe content and approach (which seemed especially important in the more non-digitally oriented panels, to break down any assumptions that there was a straight-up divide between the digitalists and textualists. I tweeted to capture any single phrase, idea, or question, quoting it if possible, given space. And I tweeted to ask questions; sometimes questions that I planned to ask the panelist, but which seemed more widely applicable, and sometimes questions that someone else might answer.

I marked when someone said something that thrilled me, or that captured something of the reasons that I have been drawn to this work. Is this any different than complimenting someone less publicly, at the end of a panel, or when you encounter them in the hallway at a conference? No, not in one sense, if the person is on Twitter, and yes, in another, because in order to make that compliment public, I needed to at least attempt to articulate it in a form that would be coherent for others. I think of this sort of complimenting as akin to exchanges that I’ve heard offline among academics, where someone praises a book, or a scholar, and this is where I sound cynical, because sometimes the praise sounds like namedropping, and what I like about reading people’s tweets about something that impressed them is that I often get a much more particular than general, non-specific sense of “X is so great.”

I met people through interacting via Twitter whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise. And because I met them through Twitter, I’m more likely to be in touch with them in future months, rather than depending on remembering to email them (and trying to say something intelligent in said email).

Twitter can make conferences more professionally useful

Every time there’s a meeting at my university for dissertating (or about-to-be-dissertating Ph.C.s who are preparing for the job market, someone asks “should I go to conferences?” And without fail, the Placement Committee says, “no, probably not. Conferences aren’t really useful at that stage.” You may or may not end up at a panel at 8:30 a.m. on the first day, or at 4:00 p.m. on the last day; you may or may not have an opportunity to meet senior scholars. To be maximally successful at conferences (especially those labelled as “important,” which are usually large), especially as a graduate student, you need to be adept not only in producing intelligent content for your paper, but also at self-presentation. This includes the ability to be involved in cogent, concise conversation, and to respond with provocative questions. Neither of these are skills that are taught in graduate school in most humanities departments (excepting theatre); they’re part of what’s often thought of as natural talent or charisma, or an aspect of mentoring. Oh, and speaking of mentors, that’s something else you often need to succeed at an important conference: a senior scholar who knows you and gives you introductions, and credibility. And just to be in the right place at the right time, poised for an interaction with someone who is not rushing to another panel, or to meet someone else.

A digital forum that’s simultaneous with an academic conference (be it on Twitter, or identi.ca) changes that, because your interactions with other people, be they senior or junior, take place over a few days, rather than in 5 minutes, and more likely, when the people you’re interacting with have enough energy to be social.

Too big to tweet: Peter Shillingsburg’s Presidential Address

Sometimes it was easy to draw out single thoughts for repetition, but tweeting the STS banquet, and Peter Shillingsburg’s presidential address, was extraordinarily challenging, because the address was beautifully written, and bold and cogent, and yet most of Shillingsburg’s points would not have fit within 140 characters, and his words were so carefully chosen that I could not entirely feel comfortable trying to paraphrase him with shorter synonyms. I tried to condense occasionally, because I did think it important to amplify his voice to an outside audience, who might not encounter the speech when it is (I trust) published in the Textual Cultures journal. I think it will be an address that is remembered and studied in years going forward, but studying textual transmission has taught me just how much transmission (or transformission) and preservation is the work of many, rather than one, and it is precisely because of that learning that I found it important to tweet.

Yesterday morning, at 5 a.m., I encountered Peter in the hotel lobby, as we were both on the way to the airport, and as impressed as I was the night before, I was even more impressed because he was articulate enough at the arse-crack of dawn to say that he’d read the tweets attempting to capture some of his ideas. “Some of it seemed like transcription,” he said, “and some questions, and some misunderstandings.” I had acknowledged that it had been challenging to capture, though both Barbara Bordalejo and I had felt that it was important to do so. Peter said that he wasn’t sure whether he should get in and start clarifying, or let it be; and I didn’t have an immediate answer that I could give as I headed out the door to the shuttle. As I thought about it more, I’m inclined to say that while he could respond by joining Twitter, it’d be more effective for him to respond with a post on a website. He could even use Storify to do so. The primary purpose, though, of tweeting, was to accent the address as the finale of the conference, both to pique interest in it immediately, and later, when anyone searches the #sts11 tweetstream, and eventually, when it’s published in print. The secondary purpose, at least for me, was to think actively and respond, as I would in a classroom or in conversation; because I articulate differently when I am doing so publicly than privately*. I don’t think anyone reading the tweetstream would ever think to formally quote Peter via @paigecmorgan, @bordalejo, or others; the tweets serve more as constellations — navigational guides twinkling in the dark (but beware of will’o’wisps, which conceivably exist.) And I note that no one, including me, made purely descriptive statements, like: “Shillingsburg is discussing the intersection of bibliographical criticism and McKenzie’s sociology of texts, and the issues that arise for scholarly editors from their intersection.” It would have taken two tweets, but we could have — and chose not to. Why is that?

Twitter and conflict; or, Twitter isn’t enough — but sometimes, neither is spoken discussion.

There was a great moment in the end of the spatial technology roundtable on Thursday afternoon, when @samplereality tweeted “Data visualizations are a symptom of screen essentialism.” This comment might have stayed submerged in the backchannel if @mkirschenbaum hadn’t asked him about it directly during the question-and-answer/discussion section. And I’ve been thinking about the exchange ever since, and not just because it raised interesting questions for me about the approach of digital humanists vs. traditional textualists (about which I’ll say more later), but because I think it captured a certain richness of dialogue that’s only possible with both backchannel and spoken discussion. Sample’s statement was so compact that it sounded dismissive; whether to sound dismissive was his intention or not, I won’t speculate. But his point about the danger of uncritically accepting data visualizations is quite valid. If I recall correctly, he was on the point of leaving the room when Kirschenbaum called attention to his statement; but as a result, the panel, and the rest of the room, had a chance to respond to it.

I don’t know why Sample was only willing to issue his critique on backchannel, rather than vocally, but I also don’t know whether, if he had phrased it as a spoken question, the statement would have had the same compactness and weight that it did, which for me, helped to characterize the urgency of the critique. It would have been a different discussion if it had been conducted entirely audibly, not least because I think that it would have been much more challenging to articulate a potential problem with data visualizations while effectively managing vocal tone. When voiced, it sounded less barbed, because Matt Kirschenbaum was reading it, rather than Mark Sample saying it. If he'd spoken, rather than tweeted, we would have had a different version of the discussion — and I think I prefer the one that we had.

Tweeting in a textual context

I’m sure that someone before me has made the connection between Jerome McGann’s radial reading, as discussed in ch. 5 of The Textual Condition, and Twitter, even though I don’t see any blog posts on it in a preliminary search. For any non-lit-crit readers, radial reading, in McGann’s own words, “involves decoding one or more of the contexts that interpenetrate the scripted and physical text” (119), and it’s associated with intertextuality and allusion, which have long been foundational tools in academic writing, especially in the humanities. It’s the idea that no text exists in a vacuum, and that in many cases, authors intentionally direct readers to read other things.

To tweet at a conference, which often involves reading (albeit quickly), the tweets arriving in the hashtag stream, is to read radially. Is it to write radially, as well? Transcribing and summarizing isn’t what I’d originally conceived of as radial writing, but I think that’s because my preconception is that radial writing has to involve a more brilliant/exalted response than just repetition. Some radial writing does, obviously. However, I think to dismiss the value of transcribing and broadcasting through repetition or paraphrase is to uphold the bias towards solitary authorship (and implicitly, against collaboration) that’s been longstanding in the humanities. McGann acknowledges that radial reading is “the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text’s own (often secret) discursive acts” (122). Tweeting at a conference is advanced, not because it uses technology, but because it requires decision making about what to type, and how to type it (this should be familiar to writers everywhere), and that’s difficult to do. I haven’t heard any discussions about conferences as texts, and I’d bet that’s because the discursive acts that they represent often are secret, or rather, secreted — in electronic files, which may be forgotten, or may appear in journals and books months or years later, and may or may not be available at an affordable economic price, and may or may not be found by conference attendees.

From reading tweets, throughout the conference, I gained a sense, sometimes very specific, sometimes not, of what was going on in other panels. I didn’t always read these tweets as they were being sent; checking the hashtag was something to do at breaks, lunch, and in the evening. Sometimes I found it difficult to tweet and focus at the same time; but other times, the listen-and-transmit mode wasn’t an obstacle at all. I know that there are things that I missed; that tweets don’t adequately substitute for the experience of being at a panel. But I could hardly help but be appreciative of them. Some of the things that I’m thinking about as a result of the #sts11 twitterstream that I would otherwise have missed:

1) Platform studies, which I’d never heard of, via @mkirschenbaum: Editing is platform studies and platform studies is editing. This seems obvious in retrospect. #sts11

2) How location affects reading, via @samplereality: How can we talk about books without talking about where we are when we read them? The location and posture of our physical bodies. #STS11

3) via @KLeuner: martha nell smith: Is it a fantasy that texts are more dynamic in the digital world? #sts11

4) via @KLeuner: Marta Werner notices there are only women at Editing Digital Feminisms panel #sts11

5) After the discussion about data visualization started in the geospatial tech roundtable, I was wondering how crowdsourced data might affect the degree of trust we put into it. But I wondered if I was being silly to ask such a thing. @mattlaschneider encouraged me to do so, and also reminded me of Randall Munroe's crowdsourced color survey.

I haven’t seen very many statements trying to define what Twitter is for, in the context of a conference. Maybe that’s because no one wants to try and limit what micro-blogging can do — but here’s an alternative reason: it’s controversial to suggest that Twitter is useful because saying so calls attention to the weaknesses in current academic infrastructure and culture. By weaknesses, I mean not only the factors that have made conferences less productive in the past, but also economic constraints that I’ve heard referenced that make it less common to have teaching appointments funded by more than one department; and the often intense workload that non-tenured faculty members face. It calls attention to the common tendency to assume that only faculty and graduate students hoping to become faculty are scholars, while staff members aren’t.

In short, the discomfort surrounding Twitter, and the potential advantages of using it (whether using means actually tweeting, or just reading) are entangled with the social structure and customs of academia (and probably broader literary culture, as well.)

But can’t you get ADHD from Twitter?

The concerns I’ve seen raised most often about Twitter-use during conferences (and at other meetings, too, but for this post, I’m not addressing those other settings) is 1), that users who are tweeting aren’t listening to the talk, and 2), which follows that concern, that users who are tweeting are being disrespectful. The first is a little tricky, because users who are new to the platform will certainly find the multitasking of tweeting and listening challenging. Then again, when I’ve relied on writing notes at conferences, I’ve often heard the speaker say something that flashes in my mind, and sets off a whole chain of other ideas and questions. In those situations, I have to choose whether to try and write them down before I forget them, sacrificing my attention to the speaker; or keep focusing, and hope that I can remember what started the domino chain of ideas. In short, this multitasking problem has existed for as long as we’ve been taking notes, no matter in what format. Furthermore, short attention spans are hardly endemic only in tech use — if anything, the traditional conference format, with concurrent panels and minuscule breaks between sessions, does far more to promote brief encounters that are never followed-up on than a site like Twitter, where anyone who adds me as a result of what I said at #sts11 will keep seeing what I say (or drop me for posting too much about sci-fi and cats).

As for the idea that tweeting during a session is disrespectful, even when the tweets are positive — well, I haven’t heard that particular judgment from any of the textualists that I know, and I’m glad, because it would be just as easy for people to question the respect or disrespect arising from the work of producing critical apparati, and emphasizing the collaborative authorship of single works, or whole oeuvres. I’d stake a lot on Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius being unwelcome to at least a few of its subjects. I also think that the idea that tweeting during lecture is disrespectful is not a new conflict. Long before Twitter, I heard teachers expressing either perturbation that their students were frantically writing notes without looking up, or alternatively, that their students stared at them, and never wrote anything down. In that sense, Twitter really is just the pen and notepad in a different shape. **

It would be interesting to talk more about the ethics of radial reading on the internet, and our habits in doing so, because the choices that people have made in radial reading, and continue to make, have considerable force in arenas outside of academia. When I say this, I’m thinking about everything from radial reading habits as they effect our consumption of news (especially political content) to situations where people produce content both under their own name and under a pseudonym, and the controversies that arise therein.

What I still don’t know

I hardly think that this post is definitive on the subject of tweeting at academic conferences; so here are the things I don’t know:

1. Do you have to be participating as a Twitter-user in order to get the benefit of a conference stream? Does it work as well if you’re just reading? (As someone looking forward to reading the #asecs11 stream, I think that reading is valuable — but that’s partly because I can respond to the Twitterers if I choose to. Someone without an account can’t.

2. A question especially for people like Peter Shillingsburg, Paul Eggert, Marta Werner, and Martha Nell Smith, all of whom had remarks tweeted throughout the conference — but this goes for anyone whose work is talked about in Twitter, but doesn’t have an account. What does the discussion look like to you? And if you decide to respond, what format might you take?

ETA, a restatement of the above question from Kirstyn Leuner, which I think is more effective and direct at what I was trying to get at with question #2: Are all conferences and conference papers equally public? And is it *always* ok to tweet out conf papers, as convention?

3. Who do conference tweeters see as their audience? And what choices are they making in order to serve that audience? (Links, non-links, use of twitlonger, etc.

4. Is there a minimum number of people who need to use Twitter in order to make a conference twitterstream useful? How do we say when a stream is helpful and when not?


*This is not to say that one is better than the other; or that what is true for me is true for anyone else, but I find that when I am thinking privately, I tend to be documenting, and when thinking publicly, I tend more towards constructing. I wanted to be constructive at STS in general, and with the Presidential Address in particular, because I find I am often able to reach new heights when I do, in a way that I cannot always do in private.
** Also, though I’m saying so flippantly, I can’t help but think about what it would look like to compare the rudeness of tweeting during a panel with the rudeness of the printed matter created as a rivalry between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll.

Dido's Lament, by Alison Moyet

This? Is EXCELLENT.

Book Review: Bumped, by Megan McCafferty

When a virus makes everyone over the age of eighteen infertile, would-be parents pay teen girls to conceive and give birth to their children, making teens the most prized members of society. Girls sport fake baby bumps and the school cafeteria stocks folic-acid-infused food.

Sixteen-year-old identical twins Melody and Harmony were separated at birth and have never met until the day Harmony shows up on Melody’s doorstep. Up to now, the twins have followed completely opposite paths. Melody has scored an enviable conception contract with a couple called the Jaydens. While they are searching for the perfect partner for Melody to bump with, she is fighting her attraction to her best friend, Zen, who is way too short for the job.

Harmony has spent her whole life in Goodside, a religious community, preparing to be a wife and mother. She believes her calling is to convince Melody that pregging for profit is a sin. But Harmony has secrets of her own that she is running from.

When Melody is finally matched with the world-famous, genetically flawless Jondoe, both girls’ lives are changed forever. A case of mistaken identity takes them on a journey neither could have ever imagined, one that makes Melody and Harmony realize they have so much more than just DNA in common.

From New York Times bestselling author Megan McCafferty comes a strikingly original look at friendship, love, and sisterhood—in a future that is eerily believable.

Apparently, the inspiration for this upcoming teen dystopia was the question "What if teenagers were the only people who could have babies?" It's an idea that has the potential to be gimmicky, but in a lot of ways, the book (first in a trilogy, I suspect) manages to dodge that bullet. It dodges it, or did for me, because McCafferty's Harmony is a pretty accurate portrayal of vociferous Christian adolescence, obsessed with using this life to prepare for the next one, and spouting an inner monologue that I believed. That makes this particular dystopia a bit different from other recent ones, like Matched, because the conflict between the two sisters' ideologies takes center stage, and the story is as much about the two struggling with each other as it is about each sister struggling with the larger societal rules and standards.

I found both Melody and Harmony believable, despite niggling annoyance with the need to saddle them with names that scream cliché -- at least the characters themselves explain that, and actually, now that I think about it, the names serve another purpose during the story. Melody is ambivalent about her position as a professional reproducer, but surrounded by friends who have different positions and views towards professional pregnancy, and McCafferty is thoughtful in her worldbuilding enough to allow the teenage mothers to take a number of different paths, most of which are acceptable, and don't lead to chilly, dystopian euthanasia, or anything like that. And the society does have certain rules that can't be broken, and when Melody's friend Malia breaks one of those laws, Melody's reaction to her is somewhere between sympathy and condemnation. It's painful to read this, but it feels true to the portrayal of someone who's been socialized to believe in a world working a particular way. Nor does the narrative linger too much on the melodrama of Malia's situation, and Melody's rejection of her.

Harmony is equally complex, ping-ponging between excitement and nervousness as she tries to keep track of her own intentions, which are by no means set in stone. There's one part of her character development that I was a little uncertain about, but it's something that confuses me when I see it in life, too -- so this just meant that I had to revisit that little pocket of mental controversy.

Since there are two female characters, there are two main male characters, both imperfect in different ways. I'm fairly certain, at the end of this volume, who's going to end up with whom, but I wasn't sure throughout, and I'm not 100% positive. Neither of the male characters is perfectly secure and knowledgeable; in other words, no danger of either becoming the enlightened source of knowledge to whom the poor, confused, stupid female characters have to run to.

I wish we'd seen more of the world outside the lives of the two protagonists. McCafferty makes the vocabulary of pregnancy part of the worldbuilding: terminate, fertilicious, barren -- all are ubiquitous in everyday conversation, with slightly tweaked meanings from their usage now (well, not fertilicious!). And we see how pregnancy affects the already complex social networks of teenage girls and boys, and how the Facebooking of the world has advanced further and further. But I did find myself wanting to know more. According to the book, the spread of the disease causing infertility by age 18 had become evident four years earlier. Having the culture of teen pregnancy develop so quickly seems a little fast, but that's partly because I don't know how else the world was different prior to the discovery. There's no mention at all of STDs, which I was willing to accept, and suspend disbelief for, but which strikes me as a bit handwavy. There's no mention of homosexuality, which seems like it ought to still exist.

As you can see, I'm not without quibbles. That said, was it a dystopia that made me think? Yes. Did it dodge stale gender characterizations? Absolutely. Am I curious about what will happen in future volumes? Without a doubt.

On a score of 1 to 10, this gets an 8. Bumped at Amazon.

Late Eclipses, by Seanan McGuire

When I learned that there was going to be a series about a changeling detective named October "Toby" Daye, I thought that it sounded like a weird mix of things that didn't work, plus a healthy helping of Mary Sue, and ZOMGeleventy!, I was so wrong, and I am so glad.

The series has changed with every book. The first one was noir-ish, and the second was an Agatha Christie-style country house mystery. Except that Dame Agatha never thought about the possibility of writing about a dryad, who, losing her forest, ended up in a server tree. The third book managed, improbably, to be a story about the boogey-man that was also a thoughtful meditation on female strength and sexuality, and about the difficult boundary between healthy and unhealthy self-reliance. I thought it was a little heavy the first time I read it, but that's more because it was about stuff I'd rather not think about, and the second, and especially the third time I reread it, I found myself appreciating the fact that it was precise and spare: McGuire doesn't mince words when she's dealing with dark stuff -- she gets right there, and then doesn't wallow.

The new book, Late Eclipses, shouldn't be read unless you've read the other three first. You could make sense of it if you really needed to -- it has those nice little cues to catch up new readers, and +10 to Seanan McGuire for making them reflect the character development that's happened since the series started, so that readers who aren't new still learn new things in the "Previously in..."

But you wouldn't enjoy it the same way, because most of the action (both dramatic and subtle) in this volume has been built up in the previous three, and because I understand how the world works, I can think about the story as I read in a way that I couldn't otherwise.

One of the things that I like about this series is that each volume so far has had a different pace. This volume moves extraordinarily fast. A lot like one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books -- or like Die Hard films -- except that neither of those are about complex fae politics, family conflicts, and serial poisoners, all at once. In short, it's like a Jack Reacher book, except that it's SO MUCH BETTER. By better, I mean that I can think about what's happened, and how it might relate to my own life, and how it affects the world in the books; and also that I've only read one Jack Reacher book, and it was fine, but it didn't make me want to reread, or rush out and get the others.

The Toby Daye series is like the best episodes of the new Doctor Who series: when Russell T Davies wasn't faffing about; or more recently, like Steven Moffat's weeping angels two-parter. Here's what Publisher's Weekly said:

In October "Toby" Daye's fourth outing, following 2010's An Artificial Night, the half-Fae private detective is once again run through the wringer when problems plaguing the San Francisco Fae community strike home on a personal level. First, in an unprecedented, unexpected move, the Queen of the Mists promotes Toby to countess. Given that the Queen hates her, it's quite obviously a trap, but not something Toby can refuse or avoid. Subsequently, several of Toby's closest friends are struck down through poison and illness, and she's accused of murder. Has an enemy from Toby's past resurfaced, or is she losing her mind? Physically, emotionally, and magically drained, faced with tragedy and despair, Toby's forced to deal with the long-hidden truth behind her Fae heritage. In this tightly plotted adventure, McGuire mixes nonstop action with a wealth of mythology to deliver a wholly satisfying story. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

I still have questions (as well I should, because the series isn't over yet), but with each book, I've felt like plenty is revealed, and plenty of new developments are introduced. There aren't awful cliffhangers. (Unless you count the scene that's included at the very end, as a preview of the next book, which manages to be both tense, and hilarious in a way that reminds me both of James Bond and Doctor Who.)

Read if: you like mysteries, action films, stories that are subtly about family/growing up/broken relationships but that don't put those conflicts in the main spotlight, romances that develop slowly, main characters who make mistakes, series where the overarching story is revealed bit by bit in multiple books.

Avoid if: you can't stand it when characters die, you require romances to have lots of hot and heavy sex, or you need the Massive!Overarching!Story to be revealed in one volume.

I try to avoid broad statements about the BestBookEver, because I don't believe there's only one, but this series is in ppbk for 7.99 each, and 6.99 on Kindle, and really, I can't think of another set of books being published right now where you're getting so much bang for your buck.

Get it at Amazon -- or better yet, go to your local brick and mortar.

Welcome to the future!

This week I have mostly been dissertating and engaging in social activism. I might have reason to get into the latter in more detail, but perhaps not yet.

I have also been shopping, however -- well, I purchased two things that have made my week.

The first was a Possum umbrella. I have a fraught relationship with umbrellas, as I am prone to abandoning them on the bus after setting them on the floor; and umbrellas are likewise prone to betraying me by turning inside out or simply snapping a rib or two at slight provocation. The fact that I am in the habit of buying cheap umbrellas does not help, so the abandonment and betrayal is an endless vicious cycle.

Possum's design is brilliant in that the umbrella comes contained in a small zipper pouch. Lots of umbrellas do, of course -- but this pouch, after you take the umbrella out, also contains a small canvas tote -- dimensions about 10" x 10". The zipper part, which is still its own pocket, and which can be closed, is at the bottom of the pouch.

This means that when I'm running errands in the rain, I can unzip the umbrella, and then, as I go into buildings or onto the bus, collapse it and stow it in the tote bag, which stays safely on my shoulder.

I can also stick 4 or 5 books in the tote, and zip the umbrella into the bottom, and trundle off to the coffee shop, safe in case of rain. (But this is only a good solution when I'm only going to one destination; otherwise I might be in a situation where the tote bag was the only carrier for both the books and the wet umbrella.)

I'm extraordinarily pleased. I've also tested the umbrella in a storm with 36 mph gusts, and though it reversed a couple of times, it snapped back just as quickly, and apparently with no damage.

Most people wouldn't think of the future as heralded by an umbrella that's harder to lose. I do.

The other purchase was a Livescribe Echo Smartpen. I'd heard of smartpens before, but somehow I imagined that they were strictly smart because they had a convenient tiny recorder in the head of the pen. Only in the last week have I found out more about what they can do, specifically that they allow your handwriting to be easily digitized, and with an additional application, transcribed into plain text.

I don't think I've written here about my ongoing dilemma regarding iPhone vs. iPad, and which one will meet my needs better. I won't go into that, because it's mostly personal minutia, but one of the issues that's kept me off the iPad bandwagon is that I think best by writing in longhand. On paper. Ideally with BIC mechanical pencils, but pens will work -- the important thing is the feel of the paper, as opposed to a stylus on a flat screen. I've thought about whether it might be possible to become comfortable thinking through typing with my fingers on the iPad screen, but I'm not certain, and one of the major issues that's bugged me in regards to the iPad is that I'm worried that I still won't be able to think as clearly typing on it as I can when I write things out.

I write things out all the time, hence the massive stacks of paper that make up each dissertation chapter, and through which I often scrabble, searching for the paper on which I made notes on any given date. It's not entirely messy, because I can almost always remember the color of the ink, the style of script I was using -- but it's not especially efficient, either. And if I want to do something with the notes, then I have to type them into the computer. Sometimes that creates an opportunity for revision, but often, it just adds a delay that I don't especially appreciate.

And yet, though I've adapted tremendously to the net in so many ways, I've never stopped feeling like I can think better through writing things down than I can by typing them. I spent most of today being increasingly frustrated, feeling like my argument was unraveling as I tried to integrate ideas from Jameson's Political Unconscious into it. It took less than 30 minutes of working with the smartpen to regain my footing.

I'm annoyed that the transcription application is separate rather than being included, and I would love it if the pens were rollerball, rather than ballpoint, but that doesn't dampen my enthusiasm in the least. This solves all sorts of problems, not least making it easier for me to go off to the coffee shop without taking my laptop and the temptation of the whole internet in large screen format with me.