English @ Emory

The Blog Is Dead. Long Live the Blog.

2009-04-21T08:39:00.001-04:00

*plays Taps*

Custer, American Indians, Patriotism

2008-06-25T13:37:00.002-04:00

Michael Elliott has a great op-ed in the LA Times today.

Is Google making us stupid?

2008-06-10T12:23:00.002-04:00

Nicholas Carr's essay in The Atlantic is also a brief on the necessity of teaching literary reading in the digital age as well as a warning about its challenges.

New wiki on digital reserach tools

2008-06-06T22:43:00.002-04:00

A new wiki on digital research tools -- here: http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/

Killing Internet in the Classroom

2008-05-27T16:25:00.002-04:00

In the three years since I've taught a regular class here at Emory, I've watched the increase in wireless access throughout the campus and have wondered what it will mean for the classes I will teach this fall. Undoubtedly it will be a good thing in some cases, but in others it's an opportunity for students to be Facebooking, IMing, or shopping during class. This idea rankles me somewhat. So it was interesting today to read a quick article from the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog about a professor considering banning laptops from his classroom. The comments to this post are predicable: some people arguing that we can't deny students a tool and that students have the right to choose how they learn and some people arguing that students are not customers and that the professor is in charge of learning in hir classroom. It also links to a longer article about the University of Chicago's law school getting rid of wireless access.

Thoughts?

Last class!

2008-04-24T20:03:00.002-04:00

I recall a colleague of mine saying, not long after I started teaching at Emory, that the best thing about semesters is that they end. At the time, I may have thought that was a little cynical. But now I think I understand him better. I take genuine pleasure in the ending of a class. There is something deeply rewarding about participating in something that has a definitive conclusion; of course, its the same pleasure that narrative affords in novels and films. As you all know from narratology 101, that pleasure has to do with the fact that our real lives do not have the kind of definitive conclusions that short stories and survey courses do. (And as you know from narratology 102, the ending is never really an ending, but still.)

Anyhow, I'm pleased to have finished teaching for the semester today, and looking forward to the season of endings and beginnings.

Prof. Bauerlein's pans

2008-04-21T21:47:00.002-04:00

If you were thinking of getting Mark Bauerlein that Quentin Tarantino boxed set for his birthday, think again. See his list of bad films that academics (mistakenly) like.

The coming crackdown on e-reserves

2008-04-18T09:17:00.002-04:00

According to the AJC, Cambridge UP, Oxford UP, and SAGE have joined together to sue Georgia State for making copyrighted material for download. It's a short article, but it sounds like the contention is that the publishers claim the university was exceeding fair use in the amount of material it made available via something like e-reserves. (If the Ga. State system is different from ours, I'd be curious to know it, since that could make a difference.

It will be interesting to learn more about the particulars of the suit, and also see how vigorously the University defends its practices (if at all). In my opinion, the trend has been for universities to crumple at the sight of lawyers instead of vigorously defending their practices as falling under the fair use doctrine.

Research, the easy way

2008-04-15T08:59:00.002-04:00

Speaking of projects that have implications for the way we write, this article in the NYT yesterday really threw me for a loop. Philip M. Parker, a management professor, has "written" over 200,000 books using computers to compile information publicly available online. Why waste our time laboring over a monograph when a computer could do the research for us?

Insert clever reference to Hogwarts here

2008-04-14T20:19:00.003-04:00

I am wondering if this case about a Harry Potter encyclopedia could have ramifications for other works of literary scholarship, particularly "companions" to other books/authors.

A little precision...

2008-04-09T22:05:00.002-04:00

If there were any justice in the world, or if the world were just, you know, more fun, the academic blogosphere would be more like the London Underground in the mid-1960s and people would be filling random comment boxes with the anonymous tagline, "The Little Professor Is God." (If you don't get that reference, don't worry, the important part is next.)

Unlike, well, just about everyone who has been puffing up over Wm. Deresiewicz's recent piece on the decline of English majors, The Little Professor (aka Prof. Miriam Burstein) actually went in search of some data. She doesn't comb through it all, and in fact she notes that some data that she would like doesn't seem to be easily available. In particular, she would like to see what kinds of institutions are producing English majors, and in what number. However, she does identify something crucial: The raw number of English majors is actually on the rise. It's the percentage of college graduates majoring in English (or the market share) that's on the decline.

She does link to more data than I've seen any of the other Deresiewicz posts do. Anyhow, read it here. This reminds me of the wonderful posts that she wrote collecting data in response to the "Vanishing Shakespeare" report.

Think Inside the Bubbl

2008-04-09T08:07:00.004-04:00

If you have not yet seen this interesting little tool, take a minute to check out bubbl.us, a free, online, flash-based idea-mapping application. The "Features" page does an excellent job of using bubbl itself to explain the basics of the bubbl interface, which is both minimalistic and intuitive. As with most technologies, however, it's best to jump right in and start playing around, which thankfully you can do without having to create an account first.

Bubbl may seem at first glance to be yet another instance of technology making a simple pen-and-paper process exponentially more complicated. But account creation allows you not only to save, print, link to, export, and embed your maps, but also to share and collaborate on them with other bubbl users, who may be given either read-only or full access. Unfortunately, the map is "locked" while one user is editing it, so users cannot collaborate in real-time, a restriction similarly imposed by most wiki platforms.

I can see bubbl having a variety of pedagogical uses, both individually and collaboratively, both inside and outside the classroom. From teaching brainstorming in composition courses, to having students collaboratively trace the genealogy of the novel, to providing a graphic representation of intertexuality or patronage networks to accompany a lecture or in-class discussion, potential mapplications of bubbl abound.

P.S. According to their blog, the administrators of bubbl are working on adding features and modifying the user interface prior to a beta release in the next couple of months.

P.S.S. You may also want to look at Mindomo and Mindmeister, two other mind-mapping apps.

Mourning our loss

2008-04-05T14:20:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to think of an event that could have more terrible implications for the graduate program than the sudden, unpredicted closing of Inman Perk.

I've been in denial about this all week, and am now moving to the other stages of grief.

NEH goes digital

2008-04-03T14:04:00.002-04:00

Inside Higher Ed has a good article on the creation of a new NEH Office of Digital Humanities and the history of digital humanities projects. Here.

Pandora for Books?

2008-04-01T16:08:00.002-04:00

So I'm prowling the Web 2.0-verse today in connection with ECIT, and I just came across Booklamp. It is project that, since 2003, has been scanning books and developing software that allows them to determine plot, pacing, characterization, and more of individual books. Apparently the project began Pandora.com existed, but the developers have now decided that describing their works as "Pandora for books" is an easy way to describe it for others. Another good summary article can be found here.

So what can you do with the tool? Well, eventually you could use it to find books that have a similar plot structure to one that you already like, but that, perhaps, are paced a little quicker. Because the system is based on their algorithms, it is supposedly impervious to advertising, instead delivering information only about the literature.

Booklamp is now trying to figure out what they should do with their technology, but I think it raises interesting questions for our profession. What would we learn from something like Booklamp that we can't learn from concordances? What role should computer-assisted reading play in determine a text's literary quality? Is it possible to outsource art criticism to a machine?

You can watch the video here.

The English Major in Decline

2008-03-18T14:46:00.002-04:00

A smart post at ads without products responding to last week's book review/assessment in The Nation about the English professing gig.

Both pieces, and the book in question , seem like pieces of conversations we should be having.

Jason gets it right....

2008-03-18T12:04:00.003-04:00

Jason Jones has just saved me 15 minutes by writing out his own response to the question below, which echoes many of the things I would have said. He also offers his own career as a real-life (and successful) example. Read it.

Defeatism

2008-03-17T15:13:00.002-04:00

Brian's post makes me miserable and I wanted something else at the top of the page.

To graduate or not?

2008-03-17T12:50:00.001-04:00

Tenured Radical wrote yesterday about whether one should graduate or not when one doesn't have a tenure-track position lined up. In short, her advice is to stay in school--if possible--, polish your diss, and get some articles out. She sees adjuncting or VAPing as taking too much time to allow you to polish your writing.

Others thoughts?

Social scholarship

2008-03-13T12:51:00.001-04:00

On the rise of "social scholarship" in the humanities.

Working and whining

2008-03-05T07:53:00.001-05:00

Mark Bauerlein on working and whining.

Update: Some responses, here, here, here, and here.

Don't know much...

2008-02-26T21:30:00.005-05:00

A NY Times story on another depressing survey about how little students know about history. What's interesting about this one -- besides it being sponsored by a group skeptical of No Child Left Behind -- is that it includes literature. It turns out that students don't know much about literature, either. It's nice to be included.

Update: You can download the report here.

In the Times

2008-02-19T10:39:00.001-05:00

I hope you caught the story on teaching The Great Gatsby at Boston Latin (well-known urban school). It gives a small window into the teaching of fiction at the high school level, something I think college teachers (especially me) know too little about.

I also liked this story on the semicolon on the NYC subway.

Digital Litearcy and the Wikipedia

2008-02-13T09:58:00.000-05:00

David Parry from academhack has a new editorial at Science Progress that advocates for the importance of digital literacy and uses the Wikipedia as a model. Good reading.

Adaptation news

2008-02-12T21:31:00.001-05:00

In order to stave off disappointment, I generally keep my expectations of films (and, well, most things) low, but I am pretty excited to hear this.

Archives wiki, open access publishing

2008-02-12T10:08:00.000-05:00

The American Historical Association has launched an archives wiki. Obviously, the focus are historical archives, but this could be of use to literary scholars as well. (And of course suggests that a literary manuscripts wiki would be useful.

Today's New York Times has an article about the possibility of open access publishing at Harvard. (Thanks to Prof. Rusche for pointing that out.)

Online Citation Manager/Social Networking

2008-02-04T15:23:00.001-05:00

I just read an article from last week's Chronicle about CiteULike. CiteULike more or less works like del.icio.us, but it is for academics to tag what they are reading recently. It doesn't appear to have as much functionality as Zotero, which I wrote about last September. But--unlike the current version of Zotero--it is a shared resource. Others can browse your articles and you can browse theirs. What's more, the site draws from Emory's sfx service, and therefore can link you more or less directly to the full text of an article if we have access through our library's databases.

Based on what each tool can currently do, CiteULike is a much more useful tool for research. It allows you to watch what others are reading and to take your references with you (because they're all online). Zotero has a better interface, in my opinion, and is more full featured. But until the next big release, it is tied to your local browser. And that's more or less what EndNote is.

I don't know that I'm going to start using CiteULike regularly. But that's got more to do with my not having internet access of my laptop than anything else.

THAT podcast

2008-01-26T15:14:00.000-05:00

A new podcast on The Humanities and Technology (THAT), from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason.

Blogging vs. Peer-Review

2008-01-22T10:09:00.000-05:00

An interesting article in today's Chronicle asks details Noah Wardrip-Fruin's attempts to couple the peer review process with comments from a blog where he will be posting excerpts of the book. His editor at MIT is (probably wisely) not allowing the book to go without a typical peer review process, but that this experiment is taking place at all suggests how far we've come in digital scholarship.

Making an edited collection

2008-01-04T23:34:00.000-05:00

Dustin Wax, an anthropologist, has written a detailed series of posts about all the steps involved in publishing an edited collection. Though the topic of the book isn't likely to be of interest to many literary types (and you won't realize the significance of some of the names he mentions), it's a very good blow-by-blow account of his experience. He calls it a "non-experts guide." It's in three parts: 1) getting the contract; 1a) writing the prospectus; and 2) the road to publication.

Reading about Reading

2007-12-07T15:19:00.000-05:00

The Chronicle has this article about the state of reading and the NEA' s newest report, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. There's a lot that I find interesting and on point in this article. In the interest of brevity, I'll say that what I found most intriguing (aside from Thomas Jefferson's apparently famous lazy susan for books, of course) was Kirschenbaum's point that accounts of reading must be historically specific, taking into account new forms of literacy that surface with new kinds of "texts."

Prepping for the interviews

2007-12-07T11:03:00.000-05:00

It's the time of year for advice on the job interviews. (I'm guessing advice on the campus visits starts exploding around January. It's a sure way to drive blog traffic.) In any case, Tenured Radical has a good piece up on interviews.

More, more, more

2007-12-06T15:06:00.001-05:00

Scott McLemee asks around about the best academic blogs.

Chronicle article on social science PhD's

2007-12-02T15:14:00.000-05:00

If I can find some time later, I'll pull out more of the interesting things I found in this Chronicle article about a study of recent PhD's in the social sciences. For now, I'll say that I don't see much here that doesn't apply to humanities PhD programs as well. The article quotes this line from the report: "Career preparation should begin at the beginning of a doctoral program."

Blogging about technology

2007-11-29T13:16:00.000-05:00

I'm not the only one who occasionally blogs about technology and its uses in pedagogy. In fact, there must be hundreds of these things. But an interesting one that I found today Princeton's IT's Academic. The blog is for and about faculty use of technology in research and the classroom. There are no specific authors listed, so it is probably an official organ of the university. But its relatively low traffic flow means that once a month or so you'll get a chance to read about a new idea.

Wise Words on Dressing the Part

2007-11-26T11:00:00.001-05:00

From the Philosophy Job Market Blog comes wise words for men needing to buy clothes for job interviews.

In which I reprint an email sent to ILA faculty in order to make a point

2007-11-25T16:34:00.000-05:00

I was really surprised to learn that no one from English had signed up for the intensive grant writing workshop put on by the CHI and CSPS in the spring -- particularly since the new Graduate School rules for research funding will require that students asking for more than $2500 (cumulative) will need to submit proposals to a competitive review. And then an e-mail from one of the workshop organizers, Prof. Ivan Karp, to some ILA faculty found its way to me. I reprint part of it:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Interesting news
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:36:26 -0500
From: Ivan Karp <ikarp@emory.edu>
To: [names deleted]

The number of applications to our Intensive Grant Writing Workshop has
gone from 8 to 25 this year, an indication that the changes in the
funding guidelines from the Graduate School and the increasing emphasis
on producing a grants oriented culture at Emory is taking hold, at
least in some places. Some Departments are represented by 0
applications and History, on the other hand, has produced 50% of the
total, up from 2 last year to 12 this year. This is an indication that
what I think is going to happen, that funds will be programmed away
from departments which have no proposals being written in them, like
French and English, to departments where proposals are being written,
mainly Spanish and History, will indeed happen.

The email goes on to say that ILA is going to end up with us, on the losing end of the money game, unless they start getting their students to go to these things.

How many of you think you'd like to have a CHI fellowship -- or even better, a dissertation fellowship from Mellon or the AAUW? Get funding from a research library? How about a year to write a book? How about placing your book with a top publisher? How about getting enough money from Emory to pay for a month in an archive? All of these things -- even, under the new guidelines, getting substantial funding from Emory -- require being able to write a proposal aimed at an audience that goes beyond your dissertation committee, and even your discipline. (In fact, the dreaded dissertation paragraph of the job letter is a lot like a grant.) You learn these things by practicing them, and workshops like the ones the CSPS offer a chance to get that practice.

I can describe the importance of fellowship grants best by describing the career I know best: my own. There are two fellowships that were incredibly important to me. When I was researching my dissertation, I received a one-month fellowship to work at the American Antiquarian Society. At my institution, winning an award like this was the only way to receive funding for research travel (we did sometimes receive $50 or $100 to go to a conference), and I applied because I needed the money to support my stay there. But what I gained from the experience was far richer than I had imagined: Not only did I find things in the archive I hadn't dreamed of (archive librarians are more helpful to fellows), but also I had the chance to talk to other, more senior scholars working on related topics. Finally, I think having the fellowship helped me make the case that this research was considered of interest when I was applying for jobs.

The second fellowship that I received was a year-long fellowship at a research center similar to the CHI. I took this fellowship in my second year on the tenure-track, and used it to rewrite the dissertation into a book (as well as to make progress on an edited collection). By the time I returned to Emory, my manuscript was out with presses, and I was much, much less anxious about tenure than I might have been otherwise.

Are these the only things that helped my career? No. I'm pretty sure that an article I published from my dissertation helped me immensely on the market, and I also had a lot of luck (thank you, Katherine Stubbs!). But they surely helped. Would I have made tenure without the fellowships? Probably. I would have used summers and Emory's junior leave to finish the book, and that would have helped me make tenure, but it would have been very different for me.

I can go on about this. When I was starting my second book, for instance, I immediately sought out a library grant because I knew it would do the same two things for me: Give me valuable time in an archive, and give me a kind of endorsement on the project that I could use.

Enough autobiography. Here's the important thing. Many of you will be going to institutions that do not have the teaching load, leave policy, or travel funding that Emory faculty have access to. In fact, many of you will have less access to travel funds as a faculty member than you do now as a graduate student. To pursue your research agenda -- however modest or ambitious -- you will need to find funding for course releases, semesters off, and travel. You should be taking advantage of what Emory has to offer to learn as much as you can about the skills needed to do that. And before you say that you plan to teach at a teaching college and not at a research university, think about whether you wouldn't like to continue some kind of research agenda -- one that might include an occasional Fulbright research fellowship or a reduced teaching load to finish an article.

We are, at bottom, in the business of not just knowledge, but the management and communication of that knowledge. Learning to write effective proposals is a lot like mastering the skills of teaching. You all work very hard (much, much harder than many of your peers) to become some of the best teachers in the university -- so that you can share your knowledge effectively. What I am suggesting is that you need also to labor so that you can effectively share your knowledge about your research.

Expect more musing, quasi-autobiographical screeds in this space as I go into my DGS dotage.

On angst and the job search

2007-11-17T11:18:00.001-05:00

New Kid on the Hallway has an outstanding post on job search angst.

Impostors!

2007-11-16T12:34:00.000-05:00

We've all been there: feeling like we're not good enough at what we do to be here or to be earning the degrees we will soon (hopefully, for some of us) have. The Chronicle last week ran a piece on impostor syndrome, and while I don't know that this is new information, seeing it again made me feel better.

A Bird's Eye View of the Department

2007-11-16T10:47:00.000-05:00

Piggy-backing off of Brian's work with Google Maps, I thought it might be useful/interesting to work up a visual representation of the department's geography.

This map shows the geographic origins of the past five cohorts of grad students. (Because I took the info from back issues of Loose Canons, current first-year students are not included):
Green: 06-07
Red: 05-06
Blue: 04-05
Teal:03-04
Yellow:02-03

This one shows where these same students earned their degrees.

And this one highlights where and when our esteemed faculty received their doctorates (or MFAs):
Blue: 2000s
Red: 1990s
Green: 1980s
Teal: 1970s
Yellow: 1960s

I wanted to make a map of the institutions at which faculty taught before coming to Emory, but that information apparently is locked away in the same briefcase that contains the country's nuclear lauch codes.

Our students (?)

2007-11-14T10:09:00.000-05:00

One of the "great" things about being a Woodruff Library Fellow is that I get to be on an additional listserv that people use for questionable purposes. Someone sent this collaborative video project produced by a cultural anthropology class at Kansas State. It's not particularly new, but it summarizes the perspective of students who are coming into our universities and, thus, classrooms.

Undoubtedly, there are parallels between the students at Emory and KSU and between those in English classrooms and cultural anthropology ones. But there are some differences as well. One in particular is the class size in English (indeed, all the humanities) will tend to be smaller than those in the hard or social sciences. I'm also surprised that students in English classrooms tend to use their laptops less frequently than in other classrooms (this is anecdotal at best). There are other differences, to be sure. But as I'm on the job market this year, this serves as a nice way to start thinking about questions I can answer and ask at interviews and as I (hopefully) have the chance to meet with students on campus visits.

Why being an SEC coach is sometimes better than being DGS

2007-11-13T14:02:00.000-05:00

I suppose showing up at MLA with tailored black suits for our job candidates wouldn't quite have the same effect.

But helmets might help.

Ethnographies

2007-11-12T15:05:00.000-05:00

Having just returned from a Bad Conference Experience, I am quite amused by this post, which creates a typography of irritating professor types. I spend this entire job market season aspired to be Professor Watches-Sports. I can say, however, that a particular type, well-represented at my Bad Conference, is missing from this list: Professor Wears-Clothes-With-Many-Holes-as-though-
That-Credentials-his-World-of-Ideas-ness.

100 great American novels you've (probably) never read

2007-11-12T09:37:00.001-05:00

So I noticed this book listed among the new ones the library has purchased, and I managed to find the table of contents online. Turns out that Karl Bridges is wrong. I've read 2.08 of these novels: Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (thank you, quals), Frank Norris's McTeague (thank you, orals), and the first chapter or so of Neal Stephenson's Big U (thank you, obsession and enabler brother).

I obviously have a ways to go.

TAPOR

2007-11-05T22:43:00.000-05:00

On Friday, I went to a digital libraries symposium sponsored by the library. One of the things that was interesting to me was how well the English dept. and the ILA were represented. On the English side, not only were graduate alums like Erika Farr and Rebecca Sutton Koeser there, but also Prof. Schuchard and I. Just think of this: If you look at Prof. Schuchard's research profile and mine, it's hard to think of two different positions within the field of English. Yet there we both were at the symposium thinking about the way that digitization is changing the shape of knowledge. The point: If Prof. Schuchard and I both think something is important, it probably is.

Anyhow, the keynote by Geoffrey Rockwell -- a digital text and humanities scholar -- was terrific. Rockwell was talking primarily about TAPOR, the Textual Analysis Portal for Research. It's "platform" that allows you to import texts and then apply various tools to them -- and will hopefully allow others to develop more tools. I've played with it a little; one of the interesting things at the site is a set of "recipes" that show some of the ways that this can be used. Anyhow, it's still in development, but it's worth a look. One of Rockwell's points was that these electronic tools don't necessarily change what we look at, or what we look for, but can change the ways we generate data.

Teaching poetry at West Point

2007-11-05T08:54:00.001-05:00

NPR story about teaching poetry at West Point.

On applying everywhere and junior faculty moving

2007-11-02T10:28:00.000-04:00

Sisyphus over at Academic Cog has a very interesting post on the market pressures to apply everywhere. She also links in her post to one by Dr. Crazy about the ethics behind applying for "better" jobs when one is junior faculty. A perspective opposing that of Dr. Crazy can be found at Rate Your Students.

On Blogging

2007-11-01T13:42:00.000-04:00

Adam Kostko, of The Weblog, and Scott Eric Kaufman, of Acephalous, both have interesting pieces at Inside Higher Ed about blogging as graduate students and academic discourse. Lots of good points in both, though the most salient thing I leave with is bafflement at how these graduate students seem to have so much time for blogging.

Sven Birkerts on literary blogging

2007-10-31T12:37:00.000-04:00

This is a bit old, but I found it interesting. In late July, Sven Birkerts wrote this piece for the Boston Globe on the importance of reviewers as opposed to the growing trend of literary blogging. Predictably for someone who wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, Birkerts finds that we are losing something that makes us a culture as we turn to more dispersed communication models: a common experience. Literary criticism and book reviewing become, he thinks, similar to what Matthew Arnold identified as the best that's been thought and siad.

We've all seen this argument before, but it strikes me as germane given that our future employment more or less depends on our playing at least some role as arbitrators of what should be thought, said, and/or read.

Greenblatt goes digital

2007-10-23T13:55:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Rick Rambuss for pointing out this Chronicle article on Stephen Greenblatt's use of technology in his class on "Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century."

From the Chronicle Wired blog

2007-10-22T19:50:00.000-04:00

From the Chronicle's Wired blog:

October 22, 2007

Humanities Scholars Get Networked

The Social Science Research Network, an online clearinghouse for current research popular among social scientists, has created a Humanities Research Network along the same model.

The new network will cover three areas: philosophy, classics, and English and American literature. More disciplines will be added in the coming months.

Authors can upload abstracts or PDF files of working papers, or share published papers as long as they hold the copyright. There is no charge to upload a paper or, in most cases, to download one that is posted. Each author’s contact information appears along with the article so that readers can offer comments.

Scholars involved say that the network, known as the HRN, meets an urgent professional need.

“Most of us in the humanities have so little money to travel to conferences these days,” said Susan Sage Heinzelman, associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the HRN’s English & American Literature Research Network. “We just don’t have the kind of ongoing interaction in our academic work that is available to our colleagues in the law school, the business school, et cetera.”—Jennifer Howard

Pipes and more

2007-10-19T12:39:00.000-04:00

I've put up two posts on my blog about Yahoo! Pipes, an interesting visual tool for mashing together web content and then filtering it. In any case, one of the pipes I've designed takes several academic blogs and parses them for posts related to the academic job market. I'm cross posting because I know my blog hasn't yet developed a mass audience like that venerable organ, English @ Emory.

Enjoy.

ASA gossip

2007-10-14T22:23:00.000-04:00

I was talking with an editor from NYU Press at the ASA conference this weekend, and he told me something interesting. The press is going to be starting a new series in nineteenth-century American literature that will be funded, in some part, by the Mellon Foundation. According to the editor, an announcement about this will be made at or around MLA this year. He said that Mellon is deeply worried about the effect that the contraction of publishing is having on literary studies, and this is one of the ways that they are trying to ameliorate the situation. Our conversation was cut off, so I didn't get the chance to ask whether Mellon was funding other such series in other fields at other presses. Regardless, this is a development worth paying attention to.

Updtate: Pat Cahill just passed on to me this link to a Chronicle article about the Mellon program, which definitely suggests that it will involve multiple fields.

Active verbs

2007-10-14T22:21:00.000-04:00

According to the Joblist search engine, there's only one ad in English that uses the verb "liaise":

Emory U.
English, N-302 Callaway Ctr, Atlanta, GA 30322 http://www.english.emory.edu/

Director of Composition: Associate or Full Professor [1640]
DIRECTOR OF COMPOSITION

The Department of English seeks a dynamic and creative teacher/scholar for appointment as Associate or Full Professor who will teach graduate courses in composition pedagogy, supervise the teaching of English courses that fulfill College writing requirements, and liaise with the College Writing Center. The successful candidate will have a PhD and a distinguished research profile as well as demonstrated administrative excellence in the teaching of writing.

Need a bestseller?

2007-10-12T14:23:00.000-04:00

Wired has the solution for you here. My upcoming title:

Community of Circuits: How Everyday Metrics Expose the Secrets of Humanity.

More advice

2007-10-09T10:04:00.000-04:00

Tenured Radical gives some advice about job applications. (The comments are useful, too. However, there is a strange debate about whether to use letterhead. I say "strange" because using letterhead is so unquestionably the right thing to do.)

Speaker release form

2007-10-08T13:30:00.000-04:00

Those who are involved in this year's iteration of TLC discussed podcasts and other audio recording today. If you want to get started on building our library of lectures from the English department and its guests, you can start to use this release form that Shannon just sent me.

Custerology reviewed

2007-10-07T19:58:00.000-04:00

A review of our own Michael (A.) Elliott's newest was published in today's AJC. You can read it here.

NY Times on time to degree

2007-10-04T10:04:00.000-04:00

Here.

Teaching philosophy

2007-10-01T16:21:00.000-04:00

Discussion of teaching philosophy statements at Academic Cog.

Timothy Burke on academic freedom

2007-09-26T11:59:00.000-04:00

This essay was published last year, but I just found out about it. It's about academic freedom, groupthink, tenure, and digital publication.

Another take on Zotero

2007-09-26T10:53:00.000-04:00

Scott McLemee is a step behind our own Brian Croxall, but his take on Zotero is here.

Comic Relief

2007-09-24T21:10:00.000-04:00

In the dual interests of not being totally gloom and doom and not idealizing academic superstars, I offer this great snarky piece about a Stanley Fish op-ed.

Job Market: Wheee!

2007-09-23T14:58:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across this post from an academic philosopher about the job market process for philosophy PhDs. While my overall response was visceral self-pity, there was also a twinge of comfort in recognizing most of our own miserable process in another humanities field. They're probably all the same, but what do I know.

One thing of particular interest was when the author notes a part of the process to be circulating one's list of potential jobs to one's committee, in order for the latter to eliminate jobs that are"too good for you." Can I ask someone to do this for me, or is that too defeatist? Do we, in English, also operate under the assumption that some jobs are just definitely too good for a particular grad student to get? If so, could someone just narrow down my list already?

Coming soon: electronic dissertation submission

2007-09-20T12:00:00.001-04:00

Beginning in fall of 2008, all dissertations at Emory will be submitted electronically. Right now, there's a pilot project involving a few departments (not us), but if you want to look at the site where you will upload the dissertation, and see what an uploaded dissertation looks like, you can do so here.

Expect to hear more about this in the coming years. One of the things that electronic dissertations will mean is that you will need to think about whether to replace restrictions on access to your dissertation. (This is already a question with print dissertations, but I do not people think as much about it now as they will when they are accessible via the internet.) I think it will also mean that those people who heavily quote copyrighted materials (think 20th c. poetry) may have to be more diligent about staying withing the boundaries of fair use -- or securing permission.

EndNote Alternative

2007-09-20T10:36:00.000-04:00

I've been a fan of EndNote since I discovered it about 3/4 of the way through my undergraduate career. It's a great tool to keep all your notes about a particular project or all the research you've ever conducted in one place. That it can help you build bibliographies is just icing on the cake, in my opinion. Oh, and for those of you who don't know, you can download EndNote for free from Emory's software servers.

I just discovered a new Firefox-based alternative to EndNote, however: Zotero. It serves most of the functions of EndNote, except that it works within your browser and can automatically create records from many of the pages you're looking at (like the Emory Library Catalog or subscription databases like JSTOR). You can also export your bibliographies into documents.

The next version of the software will allow you to share files/references with others/groups of scholars and even use RSS feeds to get the latest information that, say, the Nineteenth-Century Fiction Association might want to make available to its members.

This looks like a really interesting tool. You can watch a video tour of it here. It's a project supported by, among others, the Mellon Foundation, so you can trust its credentials in that sense.

At the moment I see two drawbacks:

Firefox only
It's based in the browser and NOT in an online account. What this means is that if I use a computer at Emory for my library, it won't be on my computer at home. Of course, it's very easy to export the files. But it would be nice if you could log in to your Zotero account on matter where you were on earth.

Still, this is a good sign of technology to come to help us become more effective researchers.

Adventures in ECIT

2007-09-18T22:35:00.001-04:00

In case anyone here doesn't have enough exciting blogs to keep track of, let me cajole you to check out mine, which discusses what I'm learning and thinking about in my tenure as the ECIT fellow this year.

I can't promise good times or even good writing. But it will keep you from having to write that dissertation abstract.

But can you play frisbee on the quad?

2007-09-18T13:54:00.000-04:00

A video tour of MIT's Second Life campus.

Coincidence?

2007-09-17T23:01:00.000-04:00

The NY Times is ending TimesSelect and making all of its articles -- and much of its archives -- free on Sept. 19. This is the same day as the "roll-out" of the new graduate program wiki.

Coincidence?

Academic bodies

2007-09-16T22:04:00.000-04:00

Horace, of "To Delight and Instruct," has written a pair of interesting posts of bodies (especially male ones) and dress in the academy. The initial post on "academic masculinity" is good, but this follow-up post -- in which he responds to a comment -- returns to the same questions in a way that I found more thought-provoking.

Academics and money

2007-09-12T10:59:00.000-04:00

I debated about whether to link to this article on academics and money, but then I figured that everyone has been so cheerful lately that you all can stand it. The article focuses on academic salaries in high-cost housing markets; what I like about it is that it gives some examples (albeit some extreme ones) of real people making real choices. (The article is behind the CHoHE firewall, so you will need to access it on campus.) I also like the point that is made (briefly) in the article that what academics are experiencing regarding the purchasing power of their salaries is part of a larger middle-class phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the ever-sensible Mel over at In Favor of Thinking has this response to the article and her own finances.

Ideological bias, academic freedom

2007-09-11T17:36:00.000-04:00

Mark Bauerlein on the ideological bias of the academy (and professors who write books for fewer than 50 people).

UPDATE: From a different perspective, Michael Bérubé on academic freedom.

My pairing of MB and MB, by the way, is a little accidental, but only a little. They have had a long and illuminating series of exchanges in different venues.

Knopf archive

2007-09-09T13:24:00.001-04:00

I'm a sucker for articles about rejection letters, but what makes this one particularly interesting is its use of the Knopf archive at Texas's Ransom HRC.

The blurring divide

2007-08-31T20:12:00.000-04:00

"Ph.D. in History" has a very well-written (and empirically supported) post on how the divide between "research" and "teaching" jobs has blurred. Read it here. While I don't have the kind of data he does (because, you know, he's a historian, so he wants data; I just want to read meaning into isolated examples), I strongly agree with the drift of the post. Especially this:

If you are one of those history PhD students who dreams of landing a "research job" at a "research institution," and of having to spend very little of your time on teaching, it is time to stop dreaming. If you are one of those history PhD students who has started burning out on research and hopes to land a "teaching job" at a "teaching institution," you need to realize that you will find very few non-doctoral institutions that will grant you tenure without publishing several articles and only a small proportion of master's or baccalaureate institutions that will grant you tenure without publishing a book.

Timothy Burke on anger at academe

2007-08-30T20:31:00.000-04:00

Between the relentlessly upbeat, deeply enthusiastic first-year students and the Yankees' sweep of the Sox, there's been a lot to smile about in the DGS office. So, let's balance that out by remembering that there are a lot of people angry at the academy. The ever-thoughtful Timothy Burke has produced this post on the subject. What I like about it is that he has tried to understand this anger (an anger he does not share) without dismissing it or becoming defensive. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't say everything there is to be said on the topic, but if you think it's important to consider the relationship of the academy to the rest-of-the-world, then it is worth reading.

Placement vs. reputation

2007-08-26T16:55:00.000-04:00

It took me a couple days to see this Insidehighered.com article about a study of job placement in top political science programs. Although the study seems a little problematic (because it emphasizes placement at research universities), what's important is that it finds that the reputation of a program as measured in national rankings does not correlate precisely to its success in job placement. The article is here. I have not had a chance to read the original paper, but it's here. Of course, it would be terrific if someone conducted a similar kind of study in English. You might note that Emory's pol. sci. department was one that came off looking well in the study.

I'll also point out that I came across the article thanks to Richard Vedder's blog. Vedder is an economist who has a "Center for College Affordability and Productivity." While I certainly don't agree with everything Vedder says, I think he's worth reading because he so scrupulously consistent in the way he calls attention to the finances of higher education.

Rumors...

2007-08-23T19:53:00.000-04:00

Two rumors that I have mentioned to a few people. Both matters should be more clear in the coming weeks:

* The Graduate School is currently considering new guidelines for funding conference travel, research travel, and the like. I have seen only a draft of these, and do not know if the procedures will be put into place during this year. The draft that I saw would make available to graduate students the same amount of funding that they have received in the past, and the procedures would not be very different from what we have done in the department. However, there would be a cap on the number of conferences for which a student would be funded over the course of his or her career. (That number still seems to be up for debate.) If these go into effect for this year, then I imagine that you will be hearing more about this sometime in December. However, I don't think it's anything to worry about.

* The department will probably be searching in this coming year for someone to oversee the first-year writing courses. When the ad goes to MLA Job List, I'll post it here. This is the only new search that the department will initiate this year. However, the department will be continuing the search for the Longstreet Chair (in African American literature) initiated last year.

Speaking of the Longstreet chair, one thing that you will notice is that when Longstreet candidates come to campus they will not be publicly identified (on fliers or Google calendar notices) as such. This is a courtesy that I have seen almost always extended to candidates in senior searches. The idea is that a person who already has a position will not want his or her home institution to find out that he or she is a candidate for another job -- at least not until he or she has it. Of course, rumors fly regardless....

Baptists, Witches, and Southern Spaces

2007-08-16T20:05:00.000-04:00

Whether or not you had a chance to attend Craig Womack's "Baptists and Witches" talk here last December, you should take a look at the web publication of the talk in Southern Spaces, the web journal that Allen Tullos of the ILA edits. The article is here, and the main journal page is here.

The web version includes the video of the talk, broken up into segments. However, it also includes a map, illustrations from an old journal article about the place in question, the text of the original short story about which he was speaking, and links to other resources. Apparently, Womack has shot some video at the location of the church, and that's going to be added later as well. This kind of multimedia web publication isn't quite bleeding edge any more (my rule of thumb is that if I know about it, it's way past bleeding, cutting, and maybe even dull edge), but it's a nice example of its possibilities. And if you saw the talk in Kemp Malone, it's striking to see how much content and context can be added via this kind of publication.

The future of archives

2007-08-13T22:59:00.000-04:00

Matthew Kirschenbaum (whose new book sounds pretty interesting) has an excellent article in the Chronicle Review about what the digital composition of texts will means to literary studies in the future. One important point that Krischenbaum makes is that literary scholars need to understand the issues of digital preservation in order to play a role in the creation of archives.

A lot of paper....

2007-08-13T20:49:00.000-04:00

For reasons that are a little unclear to me, my brother decided to send me this picture of his tenure package today. I am not just posting it here out of familial pride (though there's a little of that) but because it's instructive to look at the top binder: his teaching portfolio.

I think that probably everyone who comes up for tenure just about everywhere now submits a teaching portfolio. Maybe I am wrong about that, but I certainly haven't heard of a place that doesn't require one. My sense is that these portfolios quickly became a standard in the second half of the 1990s. When I arrived at Emory in 1998, someone here had just received tenure, and her teaching portfolio was remarked upon as extraordinary. Now, the ones I've seen lately all look a lot like hers. That spring, I took a faculty workshop on assembling a teaching portfolio. The person who conducted it believed that assembling teaching portfolios made college faculty better teachers. I'll leave that for others to judge.

So, what are the gems of wisdom to be gleaned from all of this? I can think of at least three:

One, save copies of all your teaching materials so that you can throw them in a binder someday. ("Size circumscribes," writes Emily Dickinson, but there's no way she could get tenure now; no publications.)

Two, professional standards are not immutable. Maybe I am wrong, but it's hard for me to believe that research scientists at Research I universities were submitting teaching portfolios like this a dozen years ago. (However, when standards change, they usually "creep" upwards; so now we present teaching portfolios and just as much research as a dozen years ago. But that doesn't mean that tenure standards couldn't change in other ways.) Of course, this means that when you come up for tenure, you will likely be judged by at least some others who did not meet the same standards that they will expect from you.

Three, you should never send your brother any picture that you do not mind seeing posted on the Internet.

Decatur Book Festival

2007-08-11T10:02:00.000-04:00

Like most of you, I have been living in denial of the fact that it's, well, August, and the new semester is starting soon. As a result, I've been pretending that Labor Day Weekend is months and months away.

All of this is to say that I had not paid much attention to the schedule for Decatur Book Festival, and just looked at it. If you are planning to be in town over Labor Day, there's a lot to put on the calendar, including our own Natasha Tretheway, and the sometimes brilliant, always unpredictable Sherman Alexie. Charles Frazier -- of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons -- is delivering the keynote, but what is more interesting to me is that he's being joined by Myrtle Driver Johnson, who translated the latter novel (about Cherokee removal) into the Cherokee language.

New reports

2007-08-05T21:29:00.001-04:00

The MLA released two reports on Friday. The first is "The Report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2005"; available here. The second is related to a study for placement outcomes in the modern languages (including English) conducted in 2003-2004; available here.

I have read these only very quickly. Here are a couple of things I take away from them. First, the median time-to-degree for an English Ph.D. in 2005 was 9.7 years, but that includes time that students spent in master's programs. That's probably a good way to measure time-to-degree, but it makes it hard for me to come up with a comparable figure to measure our own program. Our own median time-to-degree is much closer to 6 years -- or at least it was in 2005 -- but we do not figure in prior master's study undertaken by students.

The other comment that I want to make is that while I am glad that the MLA keeps placement statistics, they never tell as much of the story as I want to know. Of the PhD's who received their degrees during the period of the survey, about 50% had tenure track jobs at the time they received the degree. But another 20% had full-time, non-tenure track teaching; another 5% had part-time teaching; another 5% didn't specify their teaching type; and another 5% had post-docs. That second group adds up to 40% of the pool, and the real question is how many of them end up in tenure-track jobs, and how long does that take? What percentage of them finally get frustrated enough that they have to leave the hunt for the tenure track? I really don't know.

This illustrates, by the way, some of the difficulty of keeping accurate placement statistics. At Emory, in any given year, we have some graduates going straight into jobs, some who do VAPs, some who do Brittains, some cobbling together something else while taking another shot at the market, some who have already moved away from academia but are still finishing the degree; some who have already taken administrative jobs. What you really want to measure is this: What percentage of those who looked for tenure track jobs for three years (and conducted wide searches) were able to find one? But there are lots of borderline cases (people who do limited searches, or who give up after a year because of another opportunity), and it gets hard to keep track of people who move onto fellowships and teaching at other institutions.

Thinning a Library

2007-07-26T04:36:00.000-04:00

This Inside Higher Ed piece about a professor chucking most of his books is interesting, in part because it frequently mentions how digital editions and Google Books have made material books less necessary, for reference purposes anyway. (The pleasure-angle of being surrounded by books is largely absent.) All this thinking about the usefulness (or not) of books brings the professor to a rather depressing conclusion about The Academic Monograph:

“The exercise,” he wrote, “has confirmed concretely what had hitherto been an abstract conviction: it’s a rare monograph that’s actually worth a book. You can digest the idea, pick out a few key pieces of evidence, decide whether or not it really changes your mind about an overall interpretation, and then you’re really, sadly, done with it. Scarcely ever will you revisit it — scarcely ever will it repay you to revisit it, except to check a citation maybe — unlike a good essay or synthesis, which you can always come back to for insights.”

The "good essay" point does seem to say something for the much-maligned critical anthology, however.

Bauerlein on dissertation research

2007-07-24T13:56:00.000-04:00

Mark Bauerlein on dissertation research and "self-branding": here.

Anthologies and Intellectual Property

2007-07-17T10:07:00.000-04:00

I'm interested in a brief story from today's NY Times that revolves around the question of whether creating a poetry anthology creates a kind of intellectual property:

The case pits Stuart Y. Silverstein, a Los Angeles lawyer who researched and assembled 122 previously uncollected poems and verses in the book “Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker,” against Penguin Putnam, which published “Dorothy Parker, Complete Poems,” and used Mr. Silverstein’s book as a source for the last chapter without giving him any credit or paying him any royalties.
The issue in question is whether Mr. Silverstein is entitled to what is known as “compilation copyright” protection for his selection of Parker’s work.

The full story is here (registration required). I think there's a cautionary tale here for those who work in archives and have in interest in producing anthologies, editions, etc., out of the materials they find.

PhD Completion Study

2007-07-17T09:37:00.000-04:00

Inside Higher Ed reports that the Council of Graduate Schools is working on a research project about why and when PhD Students finish. The preliminary results cited in this article are interesting.

PhDinHistory blog

2007-07-12T12:05:00.000-04:00

Have you been following the PhDinHistory story? Short version: PhDinHistory was a terrific blog by an anonymous graduate student that included detailed, quantitative analysis of gender disparities within the field of history. (There were other interesting things as well.) Then the author pulled the blog when he feared being disclosed. Now the blog is back, with identification. It's here, with a post on why anonymous blogging might not work. When the blog was pulled initially, Dan Cohen wrote an interesting article on anonymity and blogging. It's here.

As a complete aside, even though there seem to be more English bloggers out there, I think the historians are better at it.

Facebook and libraries

2007-07-09T11:25:00.000-04:00

According to David Lester, some university libraries are adding Facebook applications.

Bauerlein at insidehighered.com

2007-07-05T08:54:00.000-04:00

Mark Bauerlein has a column at insidehighered.com today.

The real point of the article is about the content of curriculum. However, it touches on a critical issue: When he and I were graduate students, the anthology of theory and criticism played a crucial role in the profession and especially in graduate student education; such anthologies were yardsticks of their respective fields, particularly new fields of literary studies. (Mark gives some good examples from his graduate career; examples from my own time as a graduate student: the 1992 anthology Cultural Studies; a 1993 volume called Cultures of United States Imperialism; the 1995 Post-Colonial Studies Reader.)

Mark's argument is that these anthologies are politically weighted, so much so that they have significant blind-spots in surveying the terrain of contemporary thought. However, I also wonder about a different question: Does the critical anthology really have the same kind of institutional role that it once did? Are anthologies like these still pivotal in the profession -- in the careers of graduate students?

DVD conversion

2007-06-27T22:53:00.001-04:00

I don't think there's much in this NYT article about converting DVDs for use on iPods and the like that you all won't know already. However, what's interesting is the paragraphs on the legality of conversion. The article suggests that the issue (presuming you own the DVD and, of course, that you aren't making copies to sell) is unclear and unresolved.

Kevin Young's playlist...

2007-06-27T13:30:00.000-04:00

..is here.

Google books map feature

2007-06-24T12:43:00.000-04:00

Thanks to "Savage Minds," the anthropology blog, I've just come across the new feature of Google books that maps the locations mentioned in the text. Here's the post, and here's a sample map. You hit "about this book" and then scroll down to the bottom of the page. For instance, scroll down on this page to see the map of Hardt and Negri's Empire.

I wonder if anyone has yet noticed that this dovetails nicely with the work that Franco Moretti outlines in his Maps, Graphs, Trees -- a book that I recommend to anyone who wants to think about how technology might change the study of literature in a fundamental way. In fact, Google Books maps Moretti's book. (Let's face it, one reason that I like Moretti's book is that it gives a lot people fits.)

For now, though, this mapping feature of Google Books doesn't yet extend to fiction (as far as I can tell).

Compendium of Advice for Graduate Students

2007-06-20T21:39:00.001-04:00

As Sarah mentioned earlier, Horace of "To Delight and Instruct" has compiled a significant set of links to commentary and advice for graduate students -- and it's tilted heavily toward not only the humanities, but to English as well. The index post is here. I'll admit that I haven't read through all of the posts to which he links because, well, I'm not a graduate student. However, the range of the subjects is quite impressive, and I do know already that some of these are quite useful.

As I have said too many times before, the volume of advice and discussion of graduate student life that has been made available thanks to the Internet (and more specifically, blogging) is still pretty staggering to me.

Digitizing library collections

2007-06-07T10:42:00.001-04:00

This Insidehighered.com article talks about the Google efforts to digitize library collections and then discusses the new Emory effort as an alternative. You can read Emory's own press release here. You can see a picture of the Kirtas robotic book scanner here.

Surviving Graduate School Readings

2007-06-04T21:22:00.001-04:00

Horace at To Delight and Instruct (inspired by a post by Dr Crazy) is working on gathering blog posts, articles, and other materials related to surviving graduate school. It seems like a blog project worth keeping an eye on.

Breaking Free from Blackboard

2007-06-04T12:29:00.000-04:00

If, as some members of our cadre have expressed, you are less than pleased that it is impossible to show people outside the Emory community the amazing Blackboard sites that you have constructed, fret no more. With bFree, a java program developed by UNC's Information Technology Services, you can liberate all of the teaching materials locked away behind Blackboard's iron curtain. All you need is to export or archive your Blackboard course, then use bFree to open up the .zip file created through that process. Once that is done, you are given the option to extract this file as a series of files and folders, or as a web site. Either way retains the same hierarchical organization as the original Blackboard site, and the web option even applies a nice little style sheet to make things more presentable. For an example of the kind of web site you will get, click here to see a translation of the Blackboard site for the 181 class I taught this past semester. I just uploaded all of the files created by bFree to my WebDrive space. There isn't much depth to the site because we didn't use it very often. (I'll finally get around to making a post about how I used Blogger as an alternative to Blackboard sometime soon.)

Of course, you have to be careful about the kinds of things that you publish on the web in this way because of copyright issues. The nice thing about bFree is that it lets you select each individual level of organization that you want to extract, so you can keep copyrighted materials out of the extraction process altogether. Alternatively, you can just not upload the individual files that are subject to copyright, which is what I chose to do. This is why some of the links under "Readings" appear to be broken.

I think that this could be a very useful tool for showing off specific parts of your Blackboard sites to people who don't have access to Emory's Blackboard system, and for easily organizing your teaching materials on your own computer.

Advice on book publication

2007-05-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

"Tenured Radical" has very good advice on book publication, and the comments are good as well. These are all historians here, but most things apply to lit. crit. as well.

Blogging, Gender, Pseudonymity

2007-05-02T19:51:00.000-04:00

Tedra Osell has a piece up at S & F about gender, writing, the public sphere that connects 18th century lit to blogs, and considers, frankly, more of what I thought she might talk about when she was here.

Re:print

2007-05-02T12:12:00.000-04:00

Alum Jason Jones is the co-editor a new book blog, Re:print.