Digital Humanities Now, WSU Writing Assessment, a new ProfHacker post, and I’m ABD

I figured I’d spare you all four tiny posts and instead roll news of the last week or so into one post.

FIRST: I’m ABD, having finished up the written and oral preliminary exams last Friday. Well, the written exams were Sept 14 – Oct 5th, then I turned in my dissertation prospectus, then I had a 2-hour chat with my committee on Fri, Nov 13th. Voila, ABD. Since I’m finishing up early (as post-doc or job prospects present themselves, although if everything goes to hell I suppose I’ll just stay for the 4th year), that means the 4-month countdown clock to dissertation completion has already started. Neat!

Next: there’s a new post by me at Prof. Hacker: “Working with Creately—happy diagramming”. If I were teaching professional & technical writing right now, or anything related to multimedia in the DTC program here, students my would be using Creately. I am a huge believer in UML modeling and website wireframes before starting applications or web sites. Database diagrams, too. Important stuff.

As some of you know, I spend an inordinate amount of time working with the WSU Writing Assessment office for someone who isn’t a rhetoric & composition graduate student. As some others of you know, I almost was a rhet/comp student, and came to WSU specifically because I knew I could pull double duty, such as it is, and learn a lot about a lot of things. Also, I have it on good authority that people in rhet/comp have awarded me an honorary membership into their club. Anyway, over the summer I worked with another graduate student, Donna Evans, to complete the latest report on the WSU Junior Writing Portfolio. Yesterday was the presentation of those findings (Look! News coverage! Fancy). The report is available for download.

Last but certainly not least, I am stoked about Dan Cohen’s (and Jeremy Boggs!) latest creation, Digital Humanities Now, “a real-time, crowdsourced publication [that] takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.” In other words, it’s a little bundle of awesome fed by Twitter. (Melissa Terras recently said “Twitter seems to me like someone leaving some toy money, an old boot, and an iron in a field, and those who found it going on to create Monopoly. Hurrah!” and I couldn’t agree more. I keep trying to explain that to people, to no avail. Oh well—their loss.)

In his “Introducing Digital Humanities Now” post, Dan summed up exactly how I feel about Twitter, my Twitter stream, and the role it plays in my scholarly life:

I often say to non-digital humanists that every Friday at 5 I know all of the most important books, articles, projects, and news of the week—without the benefit of a journal, a newsletter, or indeed any kind of formal publication by a scholarly society. I pick up this knowledge by osmosis from the people I follow online.

A few days ago I said something similar (on Twitter): “if you read my twitter favorites from beginning to end (start at bottom & work up) it’s almost an outline of my dissertation.” It’s true. If you go to my Twitter favorites and scroll down to the very bottom and click the “more” link several times to get to the very beginning, then read your way upward, you’ll have a really really good idea of what I’m working on.

Seriously, I heart the internet big time.

Oh! I also brought a Droid home yesterday. It deserves a post of its own. I love it. LOVE. IT.

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