The Year in Summary
My contribution to the year-in-review meme:
Jan 13: According to Roger Lovegrove, former director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Tudors nearly hunted hedgehogs to extinction because
‘[t]he hedgehog was subjected to wholesale persecution because of the erroneous belief that it sucked milk from the teats of recumbent cows at night,’ he said.
Feb 3: Nyíri, J.C. “Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Secondary Orality.”
March 6: A few weeks ago I thought to myself that once the dissertation’s done I ought to look into starting an H-Net memory discussion network.
April 24: I’ve never really liked Superman, so much so that I’ve never had a desire to see any of the Superman movies.
May 6: During the WPA party at last December’s MLA, I found myself in the presence of a Viking enthusiast.
June 13: Amazon now offers statistics on select texts.
July 2: I meant to post this some time ago: the Bayeux Tapestry animated.
Aug 9: A week or so ago, I stumbled upon the Keywords of Media Theory Glossary, which reminds me of the Visual Thesaurus.
Sept 5: Having covered a number of definitions of rhetoric as a preface to study of the history of rhetoric, I asked the students in the Rhetorical History class to pick a short text and discuss it rhetorically.
Oct 12: Surely, dear readers, the question of whether or not I might use a swear word on this blog has crossed your mind.
Nov 2: Here are the four handouts for the GEA Abstract Workshop, 2 November 2007:
Dec 2: The CFP for Computers and Writing 2008 is up.
The Hobbit, Finally
From the BBC:
Peter Jackson, Oscar-winning director of the Lord of the Rings movies, has signed a deal to produce two films based on JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The filmmaker had been in dispute with New Line Cinema over income generated by the first film in the Rings trilogy.
“I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to put our differences behind us,” said Jackson. “We are delighted to continue our journey through Middle Earth.”
A director for the films – prequels to the Rings movies – has yet to be named.
The two Hobbit films will be filmed simultaneously, with their release planned for 2010 and 2011. [Read more.]
I’m glad to hear all the legal issues have finally been resolved.
Walter J. Ong, S.J. Endowed Chair in Humanities
Saint Louis University is currently accepting applications for the Walter J. Ong, S.J. Endowed Chair in Humanities. T. A. Shippey, the current Ong Professor, is retiring at the end of the academic year. [Official job ad.]
Jólasveinarnir and Jólakötturinn
It’s December 10, which means it’s time to get ready for the Jólasveinarnir, Iceland’s “Yuletide Lads” who bring gifts to good girls and boys. Don’t forget to put a shoe on the windowsill before you go to bed on the 11th so that Stekkjarstaur can bring you your first gift.
And don’t forget to give all you loved ones an article of clothing so that Jólakötturinn doesn’t take them away.
Tagxster: A Zotero-derived Firefox Add-on
I need to come back and take a look at Tagxster, if for no other reason that it might make a footnote in my chapter on database technologies as compositional tools. The following is from the Tagxster project main page:
Welcome to the homepage of the Tagxster project. This website is the repository for Tagxster, a free Zotero-derived Firefox add-on whose main purpose is to allow for what I’d call “layman text exploration” by means of tags. Unlike a vast majority of sites and software, Tagxster does not rely on the collaborative side of folksonomies to achieve its goals but rather illustrates both the social and “idiosyncratic” usages that can be made of them, not so much to share documents but rather to get the better of the overwhelming amount of digital content made available on the Web by ever more powerful tools [....]
Tagxster only displays a narrow set of rules and limits itself to suggesting how to make use of them : eventually, it’s up to its users to get the better of these. This no doubt betokens the fact that I am no computer scientist myself. Just someone who saw in folksonomies a great opportunity to build a new kind of “machina memorialis” (Mary Carruthers) for this miscellaneous age of ours :
Conceive of memory not only as “rote”, the ability to reproduce something (whether a text, a formula, a list of items, an incident) but as the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating “things” stored in a random-access memory scheme, or set of schemes – a memory architecture and a library built up during one’s lifetime with the express intention that it be used inventively.
(my emphasis)
The Tagxster site doesn’t seem fully functional yet, but my assumption is that tagxseter creates tag clouds of Zotero captured sources, not that you couldn’t figure this out on your own. And, obviously, the Carruthers/machina memorialis connection caught my eye, and I’m interested in seeing how this plays out since I include folksonomies and tagging as mnemonic practices.
Tagxster creator Alexandre Monnin is a philosophy Ph.D. student at the University of Paris studying
the existing bonds between Internet and philosophy (or the contrary). It follows in particular the development of folksonomies, the consequences of which prompt us to reflect upon our ways of grasping, classifying and dealing with things or exchanging information about them, and the need to contrive new tools that would let us achieve this goal
At some point, I ought to jump more deeply into ontology. What’s cool, to my mind, is that the ontology of philosophy and the ontology of computer science are being brought closer together by those working in cognitive science (not just Monnin’s work, but in general).
To Return to Once the Term’s Wound Down
A short list of online viewing and reading for once the term’s wound down, all academic, I’m afraid, even if a bit fun:
- Thomas Rickert and Michael Salvo’s “…And They Had Pro Tools.” A Computers and Composition Online accompaniment to their Computers and Composition print article “The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture.” (Yes, I’m a bad person for not yet having read it.)
- Ed Duncan’s “eight-and-a-half minute introduction to Old English language and script using MS Laud 636 (the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle),” the URL to which he posted to ANSAXNET.
- Ed Duncan’s “eighteen-minute explanation of the Indo-European family of languages,” also posted to ANSAXNET.
- WPA’s National Conversation on Writing video “Who is a Writer?: What Writers Tell Us.”
- A short (under 3 minute) video of Eddie Izzard in Friesland trying to use Old English to buy a brown cow. A clip from the show Mongrel Nation. (Link posted to ANSAXNET by Larry Swain.)
- Dan Anderson’s videos “Playlists and Collages in Writing and Literature Courses” and “YouTube, Playlists, and Composition.”
- Kristie S. Fleckenstein’s introduction to the Teaching Composition Nov. 2007 module “Protecting the Imaginary Domain: The Importance of Imagery, Emotion, and Bodies in Writing Pedagogy.”
Nancy Kaplan on the NEA’s “To Read or Not to Read”
Over at if:book is Nancy Kaplan‘s analysis of the NEA’s report “To Read or Not to Read.” In short, she argues that “a careful and responsible reading of the complete data provided by the NAEP and the NAAL undermine the conclusions the NEA draws.” Here’s an excerpt:
Although the data represented in the NEA version are strictly speaking accurate, they nevertheless seriously distort the data set from which they were derived in two key ways: by truncating the data set and by representing irregular time intervals with regularized spatial intervals. The first distortion creates a trend where none exists. The second distortion magnifies the effect of the decline in scores by making the slope of the line between the scores in 1999 and the scores in 2004 steeper than it should be. The steeper slope, then, suggests a more rapid and deeper decline than the underlying data support.
Note that the NEA graph begins with the year 1984 while the data set from NCES begins in 1971. Note too that the average scale score for 17 year olds in 2004 — 285 — is exactly the same as the average scale score for that age group in 1971. In other words, over the whole period for which data are available, there has been no change in reading proficiency among 17 year olds, although there was evidently a brief period of significant improvement between 1984 and 1992 (the asterisks mark statistically significant differences with the 2004 score). In short, there is no downward trend in reading proficiency over the whole period for which we have data. The downturn that did occur after scores peaked from 1988 through 1992 is statistically significant but it is on the whole not very steep nor particularly precipitous. In fact the magnitude and duration of the decline mirror the statistically significant uptick in scores over the four year period from 1980 to 1984. [Read the whole post.]
Computers and Writing 2008 CFP
The CFP for Computers and Writing 2008 is up. The conference will be at University of Georgia, Athens, GA, May 21-25, 2008. The proposal deadline is Jan. 10, 2008 has been extended to Jan. 24, 2008.
Twitter Feed- "Never try to out stubborn a cat." -- *The Notebooks of Lazarus Long*
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