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My Yale PDP 2010 Presentation

Below is the text that I read at The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities, a graduate student symposium held Feb 19 & 20, 2010. I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the 24 presenters in the eight sessions held on Saturday. Before the sessions we were given the treat of wonderful talks by Jacqueline Goldsby and Peter Stallybrass, and after the sessions the closing roundtable featured Rolena Adorno, Ed Ayers, Willard McCarty, and George Miles. These esteemed scholars didn’t just pop in for their talks and then leave—they were with us in sessions, asking questions, learning stuff along with everyone else. They all seemed like incredibly nice people (and those I spoke to directly I know are incredibly nice people).

I was speaker #2 on a panel called “Theorizing the Digital Archive” with Stewart Campbell (Columbia) who presented “Eugène Atget and the Digital Archive” and Alexandre Monnin (Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne) who discussed “What is a Tag: Digital Artifacts as Hermeneutical Devices”. Our panel was moderated by the esteemed Jessica Pressman (Yale) who is just super cool.

Although the title of my talk (no slides, just talking) was “Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text” but as I told some people, the secret title was really “Archives: Ur Doin it Wrong”.

Links are included in the text below for anyone who finds them useful. I use [emphasized text in brackets] for more info; it wasn’t spoken or anything like that.

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February 22, 2010  Tags: api, coding, collex, conference, dimensions, INKE, juxta, mcgann, NINES, omeka, texts, voyeur  Posted in: Academics, Projects, Techie  16 Comments

A mundane post of the update variety

It’s been nearly a month since my last post here, and even that one wasn’t about me, really. I’m not going to lie—the last month has been really tough. I haven’t felt right physically for three months or so, and the last month I’ve felt extra poorly. My dissertation advisor made me promise I’d finally go to the doctor—thinking I had some sort of thyroid problem since I had all the symptoms of something weird going on with it, and several people in my family have thyroid issues. Well, I went to the doctor and my thyroid is just fine. I am, however, diabetic. Who knew? So I’ve changed my diet and even in the five days since seeing the doctor I already feel better. I plan to make up for my new-found inability to carb-load by cultivating an ability to sashimi-load.

I also had a very, very troubling several weeks with a student—events I’ve never encountered in “all my years of teaching”. Ok, so that’s only 11 courses over 8 semesters not counting this one, but still. It was very disturbing. The student is no longer in my class, and the administration was really helpful and supportive. Obviously that’s all I can say about that, but (also obviously) the entire experience was incredibly draining. But over now!

Now I shall move on to bullet-point updates of things I’ve done/am doing/will be doing, for those of you who keep track of such things. Also, it will provide some insight as to why this blog won’t be updated all that much until May or so.

Oh, I do officially have a job lined up, so that’s super awesome.

• ProfHacker posts: I’ve only written two in the last month—“Tools for Synchronous and Asynchronous Classroom Discussion” and “How 15 Minutes Can Save 24 Hours of Stress”. Yes, I’m shocked that I wrote the latter, too, as I’m all about the stress these days. But I still have my sticky-note notes and it does help.
• Teaching: It’s strange, teaching 45 students in Digital Diversity and then shifting to 17 students in 19th Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas. I’m able to do a lot of different things in the big class (thanks, previous pedagogy classes!); I want to do some different things in the little class, too, and see how they work. Today I was able to sit down and plan out all the remaining assignments for both classes, which is a big load off my mind. The students (in general) continue to perform admirably when asked to do difficult tasks. I subscribe to the “hold the bar high and they’ll make it” school of thought, after all (and it works).
• Book-writing: Sams Teach Yourself HTML & CSS in 24 Hours (8e) has been out for a month and a half now, and is selling well by all accounts. It was Slashdotted; my editor says it was a positive review, which is nice. I learned a long time ago not to read reviews or comments associated with reviews, because it raises the ol’ blood pressure too much (I also spent several years receiving all manner and sorts of nasty e-mails and phone calls to my workplace and my house—you’d be surprised what people think they’re entitled to when they buy a book. The nice e-mails or the ones from people who truly had problems because of something I wrote, those were ok and I tried to answer as many as possible. But, yeah, touchy subject as you can tell.). I’ll be working on a new book, Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS & JavaScript All-in-One, this spring and summer for a September release date.
• Conferences: In a week and a half I’ll be off to the east coast to present at “The Past’s Digital Presence – Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities”. I’m quite excited to meet up with several colleagues I know from Twitter, and give my little paper, but I’ll also get to do three other really cool things: I’ll get to see my dissertation advisor and her family, now living in Cambridge (I’m flying in to Boston); I’ll get to see my fellow ProfHacker writer and long-time blog compatriot, Nels; and I’m going to see another long-time blog friend in Massachusetts before I fly back home. Such is the power of the rental car. The next conference after that will be Computers & Writing in May. I’m part of two workshops with Bill Wolff, Rachael Sullivan, and Karl Stolley—”Twitter from the Ground Up” and “Twitter to Infinity and Beyond”. I’ll be staying around for the whole conference but not presenting, so it should be fun and relatively stress-free.
• Speaking Engagements: Seriously, people want me to come talk to them about stuff. How cool is that? It’s very cool, especially considering who’s doing the inviting.
  • Scholars’ Lab at UVa: On March 16th there’s this—”N-dimensional Archives: A Conversation with Jerome McGann, Julie Meloni, and Bethany Nowviskie”—in which we will discuss ways of reconsidering the multivalent cultural record in a digital age. You know that part in Armageddon when they’re trying to defuse the nuke and Steve Buscemi’s saying “do a good job, do a good job, do a good job” over and over? That’s constantly running in the back of my mind at the same time I’m completely stoked to go talk.
  • Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington: On May 12th & 13th I’ll be hanging out with all the good folks at UMW, giving a talk and leading a workshop. In general, my talk is going to involve the rhetorics of code as employed by students and instructors (there’s way more to it than that, and I’ll post my abstract when I write it), and the workshop I’ll put together will involve Twitter and its use for personal research/scholarly work as well as in the classroom as a pedagogical tool.

If you’ve reached this point, kudos to you for hanging in there. Remember, my parents read this and they need some way to know what’s going on with me.

Oh yes, the job. I got the job I wanted. Starting in September I’ll be the INKE Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities with a focus on Information Management, in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. Here’s the ad that lists the position as “closed” because it’s filled by yours truly. I’ll also get to teach in the English Department. I am ridiculously happy about this, as you can imagine.

Also, the cats are very excited about their upcoming ferry trip and move to Canada (we’ll be going in June).

February 7, 2010   Posted in: Academics, Misc Life  5 Comments

Are your literature or digital media/culture students blogging this semester? Let’s talk.

Before the Fall 2009 semester, I posted “Teaching 20th/21st Century Lit AND Having Students Blog? Let’s Work Together”, a call for some blogging assignments that would have students talk to *gasp!* other students at different schools working on similar subjects. I didn’t end up working anything out besides the plan to connect my class at WSU Tri-Cities with students in a course at WSU (main campus) to discuss Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, but that worked pretty well.

I’m putting the call out again, this time to anyone teaching c19 British or American literature, or anyone teaching a course related to digital culture. If you think you might be such a person, take a look at my syllabi with course calendar/list of readings:

• 19th Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas
• Digital Diversity

If your students will be reading/discussing anything that happens to coincide with texts in these courses, and your students are blogging, let’s have them talk to each other!

Here’s an example of one way to work it out; this is what we did last semester:

My colleague Lisa Anderson taught English 110: Reading Now at the WSU Pullman campus in the fall. We had one text in common: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Lisa’s class read from it the week before we did, so we devised a plan that went like this:

• week of 10/26: English 110 students wrote posts reflecting on the Lahiri reading
• week of 11/03: English 373 students selected a few of the English 110 posts of their choice and wrote a post of their own that discussed/argued with/supported/reflected upon their selected English 110 posts
• week of 11/10: English 110 students commented on the English 373 posts as appropriate

The result was as expected: like a conversation—expanding the community, if you will—across 150 miles and two campuses.

If you are covering any of the authors, texts, or topics found in the syllabi linked above, in a course of your own during Spring ‘10 and you are having your students blog as part of the class, please leave a comment or e-mail me or @/DM me on Twitter (@jcmeloni).

January 11, 2010  Tags: blogging, pedagogy, social networking, undergrads  Posted in: Academics  7 Comments

MLA, citations, and a little Hari Kunzru

Some of you may know (and even care!) that in the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook, URLs are no longer part of citations for digital resources. I will quote Mark Sample on this one: “How could one not see that these new guidelines were remarkably misguided?”

Personally, I’ve been ignoring the new rule. Ok, I suppose “ignoring” isn’t true. When my students this fall cited digital resources and dutifully included the URL, I let it go. It’s difficult enough to get students to cite at all, for whatever reason (poor training, I believe), so I certainly wasn’t going to go negative on them for using the 6th edition instead of the 7th edition of the handbook. In other words, I didn’t choose that particular hill to die on, such as it were.

In his blog post on the subject, “The Modern Language Association Wishes Away Digital Différance”, Sample clearly articulates the issues at stake (as usual):

In a strange move for a group of people who devote their lives to studying the unique properties of printed words and images, the Modern Language Association apparently believes that all texts are the same. That it doesn’t matter what digital archive or website a specific document came from. All that is necessary is to declare “Web” in the citation, and everyone will know exactly which version of which document you’re talking about, not to mention any relevant paratextual material surrounding the document, such as banner ads, comments, pingbacks, and so on.

The comments on his post are all good, including the MLA’s reasoning behind the change, offered by Rosemary Feal (executive director of the MLA). In short, it’s ok to add URLs if we want; the guidelines are meant to be flexible.

So that’s a little bit of context for the brief mention of Hari Kunzru’s work in a panel at MLA ‘09.

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January 5, 2010  Tags: MLA, pedagogy, technology  Posted in: Academics  8 Comments

Brief Post-MLA Update & a New ProfHacker Post

This is just a brief note to say that I went to MLA, meet a ton of people, talked to them about plans for world domination, set said plans in motion, and generally had a great time. I tweeted a lot, as did others. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed thought that was cool to write about.

At MLA, I saw a man about a job. I would like that job very much.

Came back, signed a contract to do Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS & JavaScript All-in-One for Sams/Pearson this summer. Then I worked a little on syllabi (classes start Jan 12th!) and hope to finish those up today.

Today I wrote a blog post for ProfHacker called “On Writing for the Web” and in it I linked to a very old (2001) article I wrote for Hotwired/Webmonkey called “Tipping Jakob’s Ladder” in which I took usability expert Jakob Nielsen to task for a crappy argument he made about Flash. I’m not great fan of Flash (nor was I then), but it was a bad argument. I don’t know what made me pull it out of the archives. Maybe the headlong rush into the new decade made me nostalgic for a moment about the beginning of the old one.

But just for a moment. That moment is gone now. I much prefer 2010, and we’re only 4 days into it.

January 4, 2010  Tags: books, MLA, writing  Posted in: Academics, Techie  2 Comments

Late December Update

December has kind of kicked my butt—a lot of busywork, stress about the future, end-of-year financial dealings (ranging from buying new tires to figuring out the budget for the next six months when half the variables are unknown), and so on (where “on” includes “finishing the dissertation in the next three months”). But so it goes.

• My latest book (there are others) is now available: Sams Teach Yourself HTML & CSS in 24 Hours, 8th edition. This is something like a 90% rewrite of the previous editions; I was happy to take over development of this book for this edition and beyond. I had Sams/Pearson hire my buddy Bill Wolff to tech edit it. I like to share the wealth when I can, even if it’s just a little wealth. So far I know of two instructors who are going to use this book in their courses next semester. That’s cool. Over 200 different schools have used my other books over the years, and I’m glad to know this one is viable in an academic setting as well.
• Wrapped up the one course I taught this semester at WSU Tri-Cities. I urge you to look to the end of the wrap-up blog post to see the links to the projects created by the students who chose the “creative project” option for the final project (choices were 6-8pp critical essay or creative project plus 4-5pp artist’s statement). Some cool stuff there. It will be interesting to have 15 of the 20 students again in my courses next semester—half in 372 (c19 British & American survey) and half in 475 (Digital Diversity).
• Since my last update of what-I’ve-written-for-ProfHacker, I wrote two more posts: on Dec. 11th there was Managing Facebook Privacy Settings (round 2) to discuss the most recent shenanigans by Facebook, and on Dec. 14th I wrote Talking About Fair Use in the Classroom.
• So, despite just finishing my 5th semester in the PhD program (and just reaching official “PhD candidate” status on November 13th, I’ve applied for one post-doc position and less than a handful of tenure-track jobs. I’ve fast-tracked my work such that I’ll defend in April 2010 at the end of my 6th semester (instead of April 2011 at the end of the 8th). However, if my job search falls through, I will just put the brakes on and finish in 2011 instead. But—and I’m not saying this to be all uppity—I don’t think that will be the case. Given how things have progressed I do not believe I will be in Pullman when June 2010 rolls around. I will be chatting with the post-doc folks at MLA, and I have reached phone interview stage with one of the tenure-track positions. That’s all I’m really going to say about that, at least publicly. I’ll tell anyone anything off the internets. I will say that I am looking forward to seeing many of my internet friends at MLA, but sad that I won’t see all of them.
• Some conference news for the spring:
  • Feb. 19-20 I’ll be at the The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities, which is a graduate student symposium at Yale. If you look at the list of participants you’ll see why I feel like the kid they bussed in from the bad part of town (go cougs!).
  • May 20-23 I’ll be at the Computers & Writing conference at Purdue University. I’ll be part of the team (with Bill Wolff, Rachael Sullivan, and Karl Stolley) teaching two half-day workshops on all things Twitter (from getting started to API programming, and including Twitter use in the classroom)
  • June 7-11 I’ll be participating in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at University of Victoria. I won’t be presenting anything at the graduate student colloquium because I couldn’t think of anything on the suggested topic that wasn’t lame, and I don’t aim to be lame when I’m at UVic. Ever. I’ll be taking the “Issues in Large Project Planning and Management” course with Lynne Siemens; I know how this works in industry, but I need to readjust and learn what it’s like in academia and with academic projects.

In other news, there is no snow in my yard, in Pullman on December 22nd. That’s bizarre.

December 22, 2009   Posted in: Academics, Misc Life  One Comment

A Few New ProfHacker Posts

In the last few weeks I’ve written a couple ProfHacker posts that have generated a lot of traffic and discussion:

On Nov. 24th: Considering OpenOffice? You Should.

On Dec. 3rd: Using Super Smartphones for Productivity

December 3, 2009  Tags: mobility, productivity, smartphones, writing  Posted in: Techie  No Comments

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