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sauntering for my health

Ten days ago I went for a wee walk at Gowlland Tod Provincial Park—one of Vancouver Island’s bajillion parks. I had plans to go back a few days later and walk some more of the 25km of trails, but then I caught some nasty flu and was pretty much out of commission for a few days. Today was my Saturday—break day. I headed back to Gowlland Tod; my plan was to spend a couple hours on the Timberman Trail and to hit at least one of the viewpoints. I actually hit two of them: the Saanich Inlet Viewpoint (shown first in this post) and the Squally Reach Viewpoint (remaining photos in this post).

Before I go on, I would just like to pass along this tidbit of information: large black Newfoundland dogs, whose owners have not yet rounded the same bend in the trail that the dog has, totally look like bears from 100 yards away. It is at that point that you grab your big stick and wonder why the hell you’re not hiking with a buddy, even though you’ve seen lone people on these trails already, and remember all the prayers the nuns beat into your head as a kid. All. Of. Them.

And then you watch the polite Canadian man try not to laugh at you when he realizes you thought his dog was a bear.

Anyway.

After 45 minutes or so, I got to a little clearing off to the side of the trail that looked like a viewpoint (I mean, it was a view, that’s for sure, but whether or not it was an “offical” viewpoint had to wait until later because there was no handy sign). That’s where the image at the top of this post comes from: the view of Saanich Inlet Viewpoint. I looked behind at the uphill portion of the trail that I’d just completed, listened to my aerobically-deficient self suck air, and thought “yeah. worth it.”

I kept on going. Another 15 minutes or so later I hit the fork in the trail that could have led to the Malahat Viewpoint (go right) or the Squally Reach Viewpoint (go left). I chose left on this day, and 15 or so minutes later came to the little path that (from my perspective) opened up to the sky. It was at this point that I knew that the omen I saw on the drive in to the park—your standard majestic bald eagle soaring in the sky—was one of good fortune.

The view here is of the northern part of the Finlayson Arm—a fjord—which I’ve read is home to some very cool marine life including otters, seals, and whales. Whales!

I didn’t see any whales from my perch high above the water, but it sure was pretty. I tweeted something to the effect of how it’s a shame all my photographer friends (including those currently in Vancouver! ahem!) aren’t here to do justice to how spectacular a clear, bright day is on Vancouver Island.

July 14, 2010   Posted in: Misc Life  One Comment

i took a wee walk

I’ve been jonesing for a good walk for…well, too long. I consider late 2008 to spring 2010 to be kind of a wash. I was sickly. I was finishing school. Those things are probably related. Etc.

But now I live in Victoria, and there are all sorts of places to walk. In fact, this was one of John Muir’s favorite places (he would stop on his travels to Alaska and such), and I can see why—even a hundred years later. It’s good walking country.

Now, I don’t expect my walking tours of Victoria ever to generate the same stories as my Yosemite trips (seriously: the Great Bear Incident of 2007 (and my rebuttal)? or the random musings on sauntering? the whirlwind quick hike to Taft Point? going on Memorial Day? finding Samoset?) but really, that’s pretty tough to do.

I just wanted to go outside. I didn’t have a lot of time, and I’m new to these parts, so I just wanted something less than 5km that would introduce me to a park that had longer trails. So I headed off to Gowlland Tod Provincial Park and set off on the McKenzie Bight trail to get to the water.

First, you walk for 1.5km through the forest. Then you see this from afar. Then you stand and look around and think “yes. pretty. I like it.”

If you’re me, you don’t want to go back the way you came, because—duh—you’ve already been there. So I took a left turn up the 0.5km Cascade Trail. Short, but steep. I always forget that uphill is the “reward” for downhill. But it flattened out and I learned something important: that the 10km loop trail up there is something I’ll do next weekend.

July 4, 2010   Posted in: Misc Life  4 Comments

i seem to have misplaced a month

…but it’s been a heck of a month.

It’s also amazing how much lighter your mood becomes when your belongings are with you. I’ve had occasion to experience this twice in June—once with my own belongings, but once with those of a friend (which was arguably the more interesting experience, as I shall explain).

But let me back up. Oh, and also warn readers that this is a post about me, and life stuff, and only vaguely related to scholarly endeavors. Believe me, I wont be offended if you don’t read this.

When last we spoke six weeks ago, I explained why I had said anything for, oh, six weeks before that [to wrap up from that post: Computer & Writing conference? bad experience. THATCamp? lots of hugging. make of that what you will.]. For someone who spends a lot of time managing a blog (and once wrote a book on it, I sure don’t do much blogging of my own. And it’s not because blogs are dead, or because I spend most of my online time on the twitters, but because things are moving really quickly in all facets of my life right now—this is true for many people, I suspect—and to sit down and talk about them in long form seems nigh on impossible…but fault of the people, not the format. Somewhere along the way I shifted my brain to filtering the information stream—and more importantly, learning to pay attention to everything in the information stream—and so it seems odd to slow down and read something all on one topic. At least that’s my working theory.

Anyway, June was to include the following, in this order: move into my apartment in Victoria the weekend before DHSI, go back to Pullman after DHSI and finish teaching/cleanup the house, go back to Victoria and begin the Year of Teh Awesome in the ETCL. Now, June did include all of those things, and in that order, but with a few detours.

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July 2, 2010   Posted in: Misc Life  2 Comments

oh hey, I haz phd

I’m afraid this post isn’t all that spectacular. In fact, it’s just an update and an excuse of sorts of why I haven’t written more in this space in the last month and a half or whatever.

• I was teaching (and driving 600mi each week to do so)…that commute and those courses are over. I am teaching professional & technical writing for non-native speakers of English in the current summer session. I love teaching that class. This will be the fourth time (fifth if you count the native-speakers version, which for me is just the same course with more students).
• I defended the dissertation, such as it was, and finished all that up.
• Am trying desperately to manage ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education
• Blogged there (since March):
  • A Gentle Introduction to Version Control
  • Asking for Help is a Productivity Tool
  • Update on My Productivity with a Super Smartphone
  • ProfHacker author introductions for George, Jason, Billie, Amy, Natalie, Nels, Brian, Erin, Alex/Ethan/Jeff, and Kathleen/Heather/Ryan
  • Engaging with the ‘Screwmeneutical Imperative,’ or why I teach humanities students how to code
  • Revisiting Google Docs for Classroom Use
  • Using Creative Commons Licensed Material in Your Classroom
• I went up to Victoria for a day and hung out with the new colleagues, who are awesome
• I’m at the Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington right now; I’ll be doing a Twitter workshop and then also talking for a good long time on “System, Self, and Society: Understanding and Controlling the Rhetoric of Information”
• Next week I’ll be part of two workshops at Computers & Writing at Purdue, then I’m cutting out early to go to THATCamp Prime.
• I’m moving to Canada in a few weeks. Neat!

May 11, 2010   Posted in: Misc Life  4 Comments

Blogging for Ada Lovelace Day: Bethany Nowviskie

For the 2009 version of Ada Lovelace Day, I blogged about Martha Nell Smith. At the beginning of that post I talked about techie women in my previous professional life—or lack thereof—and how it was the switch to academia that brought to light some truly inspiring women oriented in some way toward technology (in that case, the Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)).

I’m keeping it in the academic family for this one. Have you met Bethany Nowviskie? She’s a force of nature, that one. Super awesome geeky nature.

She has a technology named after her—ok fine, so I renamed it, but still…it’s warranted.

She has the proper toys in her office.

She will teach you how to hack your clothes.

And it turns out she’s shaped my scholarly-technical foundation and my future. Good job, @nowviskie!

I’m going to quote from her Great Lakes THATCamp author page:

I’m a textual scholar (and once and future Victorianist) who got into humanities computing in the earliest days of the Web, stuck with it through a rare digital humanities post-doc (with NINES), and then bumbled into higher ed administration. Now I run the Digital Research & Scholarship department at UVA Library. I’m also Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute, a Mellon-sponsored incubator for large-scale projects in publishing, libraries, digital humanities research.
My department at UVA includes the Scholars’ Lab and a “Digital Scholarship R&D” team, filled with avid THATCampers.

Allow me to translate.

I fundamentally understand what humanities computing is, and what it is not. If you are even remotely interested in the intersections and shared histories of the humanities and computing, I will tell you what I know. I will help you find your way, both as a kind and decent human being but also as the Vice-President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. I will survey the field and find ways to combine resources and forces and create new spaces and places for digital research and scholarship. And speaking of places? Let’s all get together and talk about that at the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. Oh, and I could tell you a little something about NINES, and speculative computing, and generally how to make cool digital things with similarly cool analog things.

While I was in Virginia the other day—at Bethany’s invitation, part of her whole generosity schtick—there was some discussion about sustainability of data and what not (with @ryancordell and @digitalhumanist) and we decided that it would be incredibly important for the world if we found a way to permanently sustain the data Bethany has stored in her head. Because you see, she’s forgotten more about humanities computing than many of those who align themselves with digital humanities today even know about. We need to preserve her, for sure, but today I’m just going to celebrate her.

Yay Bethany! Thanks for everything!

March 24, 2010  Tags: ada lovelace day, blogging, collaboration, collex, community, mentoring, NINES, tech geeky  Posted in: Techie  7 Comments

Pass it On – “ESQ: The Year in Conferences”

My dissertation director, Augusta Rohrbach, also happens to be the editor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. As you can imagine, in exchange for all her scholarly mentoring I feed her information about conference backchannels and the way information moves around online. She is well aware of the valuable scholarship going on beyond the walls of the MLA convention and the ALA annual conference—conferences of all shapes and sizes showcase good work, and conversations continue online (or can, at least).

To that end, ESQ plans to publish “reports from the field,” in which “the field” can (and should) include any backchannel conversations during or after the fact. So say, for instance, that you are at ALA and attend an especially provocative panel about C21 reading practices and C19 American literature. Let’s say that during that panel you tweeted something and people picked up on it and had a conversation. Then suppose that conversation moved to the blogs. All of that is fair game for a “journalistic treatment” of the event—write it up.

Of course, if you happen to attend a panel focused on the traditional codex and you think it was spectacular and no one talked about it online, that’s cool too (and probably more likely)—write it up.

The call for participants appears below. You’d think this would be on the ESQ website but it isn’t. With permission (and request), I’m publicizing it here. I hope many of my C19 Americanist graduate students friends will take advantage of the opportunity.

ESQ: The Year in Conferences

The Editors of ESQ announce a new feature to debut in an early issue of 2011. We are seeking contributions for a group-authored overview of work relevant to nineteenth-century Americanists that has been presented on the conference circuit during the previous year.

We are seeking short, journalistic treatment of select conference papers, presentations, panels, and related events. Submissions should not exceed 250 words per panel; conference size will determine the number of panels to be covered. Deadline for submissions: as soon after the event as possible, for fresh recall; or January 10, 2011 at the latest.

We are particularly interested in reports from conferences sponsored by the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, C19, and the College Literature Association, as well as from other conferences large and small in which there is significant work being done on topics pertaining to the interests of ESQ. A service we especially hope to provide is the opening of cross-field and interdisciplinary windows onto new scholarly enterprises that may resonate for nineteenth-century Americanists but not come naturally into their view over the course of a conference year.

Faculty and graduate students in all fields are invited to participate. Please direct inquiries to Jana Argersinger [argerj AT wsu.edu] and/or Augusta Rohrbach [rohrbach AT wsu.edu].

March 22, 2010  Tags: community, conferences, ESQ  Posted in: Academics  5 Comments

My Scholars’ Lab Talk About n-Dimensional Archives

A few days ago I had the good fortune to speak for a bit at Scholars’ Lab at University of Virginia. It was an actual event, with signs and people in attendance and everything! People attended for good reason—the other two speakers were Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie. I wanted to hear them.

You see, just about everything I had to say is based entirely on McGann’s essay “Marking Text in Many Dimensions”, and Nowviskie’s experiences in the SpecLab with this piece of vaporware called the ‘Patacritical Demon. [You can read about some of those experiences in Johanna Drucker's SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing.]

Some bits of my talk were also present in my Yale PDP talk, but not too much. The goal of both was the same: inspire movement and change.

[Throughout this text I'll either place the slides I used or will provide off-site links to things for more context. Look for emphasized bracketed text like this. I should also note that I write talks like I speak, with pauses and breaks and such (which means comma splices at times, and other bad grammar).]

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n-Dimensional Archives (or, What Do You Want the Future to Be?)

“The future echoes through our present so persistently that it is not merely a metaphor to say the future has arrived before it has begun.”

I’m using this Hayles quote out of context. “Computing the Human” is about imagined futures and understanding cyberculture, and we’re here to talk about creating and interacting with n-dimensional archives. But when taking the sentiment literally, it gives me a handy way to get to the challenge I put forth to all of you today: WHAT DO YOU WANT THE FUTURE TO BE?

In this case, what do you want future digital archives to look like, and how do you want to interact with them?

I have some ideas, as I’m sure all of you do, and my ideas are in no small part informed by the past—the traditional codex and the ways in which we interact with it, plus work done at this very institution—that has traditionally been ahead of its time and thus run into “technical limitations”—far more than it has any theoretical or conceptual limitations. But more than that, my grand vision of the archive consists of little more than pulling together all the technologies we have right in front of us, right here in the present, to make an awesome scholarly future.

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March 18, 2010  Tags: archives, dimensions, mcgann, texts, textual analysis  Posted in: Academics  3 Comments

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