Humanities: June 2003 Archive Page

"While visiting my local health food store, I noticed how many non-food products are labeled "All-Natural." Toothpaste. Dog biscuits. Deodorants. Some of them, like those Carrot-Honey-Ginger soaps, sound good enough to eat. Is it a soap, I found myself asking, or a salad? Recently, I decided to find out....|Grandma's Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Soap. Oatmeal adds a nice texture to oatmeal cookies and oatmeal bars -- would it do the same for oatmeal soap? To find out, I took a giant bite of this crunchy beige bar, chewing thoughtfully. The taste was not entirely unpleasant, with a mild creaminess delicately balanced atop the solid earthy flavor of oatmeal. As the soap interacted with my saliva, however, my mouth began to fill with suds..." John Hargrave --The All-Natural Prank: Eating All-Natural Soap Cat Food and Aphrodisiacs

"The Virtual Broomcloset is proud to announce the release of Jeff Stewart's Space Quest 0: Replicated, an all-new AGI fan game set prior to the events of the Sarien Encounter! In the tradition of The Lost Chapter, Space Quest: Replicated offers fans an untold tale of Roger Wilco as our hero finds himself posted aboard Labion Orbital Station 10, a Class 3 Cloning Facility. Unfortunately, it appears that a mysterious someone (or something) has murdered all of Roger's fellow crewmates during one of his famous supply-closet naps. Join Roger as he escapes the station, travels to Labion for the first time, and manages to die in literally dozens of creative new ways as he struggles to figure out what happened aboard LOS10." --Space Quest 0: ReplicatedRoger Wilco's Virtual Broomcloset)

This is a free, fan-produced graphics-and-parser game. The graphics are cheesey, but back in the 80s that's the way it was and we liked it.

Nostalgia for cybertext genres of the recent past will increase as more tools are developed (by fans) that make it easier for the average non-programmer to create the kind of interactive cybertexts that used to be sold for money.

--100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin)

The list stretches a bit to supply words for every letter of the alphabet. Confession: Last fall, I learned I had the meaning of enervate backwards.

There are a few others on that list that are in my reading vocabulary, but which I'd have a hard time defining -- such as jejune and ziggurat .

I actually use Miriam-Webster's online dictionary.

"My new friends seem to expect the life of a young woman living in Manhattan to mirror that of Carrie Bradshaw, the alluring protagonist of the popular TV programme Sex and the City. I'm expected to follow in the stiletto heels of that (in)famous TV drama's befurred, cosmo-swilling crew. Alas, I am inevitably a disappointment to these admirers; for I came to New York not to linger over the pistachio- encrusted sea bass of the latest celebrity chef, but rather to ponder North American language and usage as one of three lexicographers working for the OED's North American Editorial Unit. And, while I hate to disappoint, there is no way around it: champagne-fizzed evenings will not be followed by breakfasts of white truffles and afternoons at Barneys - not on my lexicographer's salary. My mornings, afternoons, and evenings will be spent in an office suited for the serious study of lemmas - secluded, snug (not to say cramped), my desk laden with computers and tiny, scrawled-upon citation slips." Madeline McDonnell --Lex in the City: reflections on a year in the North American Editorial Unit (OED Newsletter)

Thanks, Jim for pointing me to the newsletter archives.

"Paul Hillard, spider specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said researchers first discovered the effects of psychotropic drugs on spiders during experiments at the end of 1960s." --Spider Experiments with Drugs (Miss Black Widow)

This is just weird.

"A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal. Freely available tools on the World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to publish their own weblog, so there is a lot of variety in the quality, content and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-nineties and became more widely popular as simple and free publishing tools such as Blogger.com became available towards the turn of the century...." Jill Walker --Final Version of Weblog Definition (jill/txt)

Jill has responded to comments on the first draft. I quibbled with her use of "personal" and her focus on creative/diary weblogs rather than filter/community blogs, but her definition probably suits her intended audience (readers of an encyclopedia of narrative theory).

"We need to take a minute to consider how anomalous a genre weepies really are. Most movies—especially American movies—are essentially dramatic, as opposed to lyrical (concerned with mood or the inner self) or conceptual (concerned with ideas). The weepie's the exception. It creates an interesting aesthetic problem for the people making it: How do you explore characters, in an essentially visual medium, who are not constantly externalizing their conflicts in action? Babette's Feast takes that problem and turns it right around, making it work for the movie." Jim Shepard --Babette's Feast and the Reclamation of Melodrama (Believer Magazine)

"Grant writing is all about power. We write grants because they bring us prestige, programs, equipment, travel, and time. Grants free us to do the kind of research, teaching, and service that we enjoy most. So why is such an essential skill so difficult and so mysterious for so many academics?" Kenneth T. Henson --Debunking Some Myths About Grant Writing (Chronicle)

"Rowling's ability to stop the Potter pretenders is largely a function of the new regime of international copyright. Until recently, countries varied considerably in how they protected literary works, especially works from abroad. The United States, for instance, has a long history of providing less protection than the Europeans. Benjamin Franklin was a kind of pirate: He did good business as a printer of unlicensed English writing. In the 19th century, the United States generally refused to recognize foreign copyrights, allowing American readers to get the latest Dickens and Doyle cheaply. And the borrowing of characters itself has a longer tradition." Tim Wu --Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright: Should Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass be banned? (Slate)

"Mr Sahhaf's daily press briefings in Baghdad during the war, at which his statements were increasingly at odds with reality, made him a figure of fun in the West.|He was dubbed 'Saddam's optimist' and 'Comical Ali' by media commentators, before disappearing as American forces entered central Baghdad." --'Comical Ali' Resurfaces (BBC)

Sahhaf is, perhaps unsurprisingly, working on a book.

"Discussions of IF design often touch on intentionality -- teaching the player how to interact with the game world so that he can solve puzzles and push the plot forward while maintaining a sense that he's an active agent in the game. What Jerz fosters here is more or less the opposite -- inadvertency, perhaps? -- which I might define as a tendency for the player's actions to have unintended consequences that nonetheless advance the plot, characterization, and humor of the game. This kind of treatment wouldn't (I think) stand entirely on its own -- giving a player an environment in which to bumble around, with no idea of his goals or the means by which he might achieve them, is a recipe for disengagement and disaster. But Jerz does give the player goals and well-defined puzzles; he just makes the route to solution as entertaining as the outcome." Emily Short reviews my interactive fiction work, Fine-Tuned. --Fine Tuned [Spoiler Review] (SPAG)

I had noticed Emily had posted a brief review of Fine Tuned on Baf's Guide, and reading it had already made me shift finishing Fine-Tuned a little higher on my stack of Things To Do.

I think Emily is right on target in her critique. She notes the tension between the attempt at an immersive period environment on the one hand and the self-aware in jokes on the other; the two approaches work against each other, and the result is that neither succeeds.

Emily also notes that the game uses points to constrain Troy Sterling's actions, while it enforces a standard of ladylike behavior to constrain Melody's actions (and yes, "Christminster" was a big influence on me).

I don't know if anybody noticed, but Troy Sterling doesn't talk. The standard IF interface does permit him to "ask al about car" and so forth, but his dialogue is never printed out (except when he says "Huzzah!"). My intention was to emphasize Troy's nature as a man of action.

After Melody gets all the exposition from the long-winded professor (my students all probably know the source for that particular NPC), she loses control of her voice, which forces her to become a woman of action. I did have an early sequence drafted where Emily [oops Melody -- Freudian slip] takes control of the Pratt Dynamo, but since the only real driving takes place in chapter 1, and we don't get to play Melody as the PC until chapter 2, the scene just didn't work.

I have about half of the dialogue written out for chapter 5, and then I plan an action sequence (which will probably expand to be a full chapter) and a final bit of character interaction.

I should note that "Fine-Tuned" actually owes its existence to Emily.

I had already created the characters for a globe-trotting kind of road trip game, in which you would play the eight-year-old kid who always seems to stow away or otherwise get caught up in the action in the old adventure movies. When Emily announced SmoochieComp, I sketched out a romance (Melody was invented at this time), and started programming. By the time the SmoochieDeadline approached, I had nothing resembling a romance, though I had most of the first chapter coded.

"But although multidisciplinary study of the media is now commonplace, it is striking how little effort has gone into examining the role the media play in the public understanding of science, which is itself, by definition, a multidisciplinary activity, though one very much still dominated by natural scientists themselves. All of this tends to reinforce the perception that, so far as scientists are concerned, the problem about science and the public is largely the latter's ignorance of the former - what academics call the 'deficit model'." --Who's Misunderstanding Whom? (Economic and Social Research Council (UK))

This is good content, but the website design doesn't do it justice.

The page has no out-of-context title (it's posted as "Untitled Document"), it uses frames (which means I can't actually send you to the page from which I got the above quote -- if I did, you'd be on an orphaned page and you'd have to hack the URL to navigate), and each chunk of text is a long string of paragraphs set in tiny, tiny type -- no bold keywords or bulleted lists. There's even a button that is labeled "click here", that takes you to a page that lets you click again to download a PDF document.

Looks like the job of putting this text online was given to a talented brochure designer. While I applaud the publisher's decision to make the full text of the PDF document available in HTML, the design of the website could use some improvement.

"From Bouffant Hairdos to Platform Shoes, these are the fashion trends which were the style of the day, and the nightmare of the next decade." --Bad Fads Museum -- Fashion (Bad Fads)

The site also includes pages categorized under "Collectibles," "Activities" and "Events". I've seen similar nostalgia sites that are sorted according to decades... this one just sort of lumps everything together. And while the site claims to cover the last 100 years, it seems to focus mostly on the 70s.

The site also doesn't have a good entry page... badfads.com is a pointless splash page, and the page you get when you click the "enter" button rather lamely offers links to the 4 categories.

Via Distracted.

A package from Amazon invokes this lustful passage regarding the New Media Reader:

"I have been leafing through the book, and I already know it solved the problem of texts and examples for the little course I have promised to plan and teach in Media Theory this fall. But most important, it promises to sate for a while my hunger, my insatiable desire for more, more answers, more thoughts, more ideas. Sometimes, I think this hunger comes from a childhood of poverty, intellectual as well as material: starved for books I would spend what little money I could get on bus-tickets to the library and return with huge bags full, and then hide in all kind of inventive places in order to read in peace, without guidance but also without restrictions, anything that caught my fancy. My reading is still like this, driven by desire, and while Noah and Nick have organised their book neatly, chronologically and with nice links and suggestions to further reading, that book is dominated by the random nature of the writing. And as such it is chaos contained in one volume, a writing driven as much by desire as is my reading, and on topics as whimsical and complicated to harness and control as my own reading habits."

Toril Mortensen --Treasure Box (Thinking with My Fingers)

I ordered my copy a few months ago, and gave Seton Hill as the address, since at that time I was too busy to take on a reading project. I imagine it's somewhere on campus, waiting for me.

"This study provides an exopolitical analysis of the policy dimensions of an historic extraterrestrial presence that is pertinent to Iraq and a US led preemptive attack. It will be argued that competing clandestine government organizations are struggling through proxy means to take control of ancient extraterrestrial (ET) technology that exists in Iraq, in order to prepare for an impending series of events corresponding to the 'prophesied return' of an advanced race of ETs. The Columbia Space Shuttle may well have been a high profile victim of such a proxy war intended to send a message to US based clandestine organizations over the preemptive war against Iraq." --An Exopolitical Perspective on the Preemptive War against Iraq (Exopolitics)

Via Gallwoglass, where Harry observes that the author of the above paper seems to have once been a respected academic.

"For months I've fought to get the number of marketing messages I receive down to a manageable number. I tried just to get to a countable number... I ran naked through my house with a tape deck, ranting. I ranted:

'In My Kitchen...

There's a Kenmore 20 fridge, a Sharp Carosel microwave, a Rival Electronic can opener, envelopes from Working Assets and SBC, Whole Foods Soy Protein powder, Hershey's Cocoa, some Safeway Select Original Decaffinated Coffee, Peet's Coffee and a Miletta Mill coffee machine.'"

Michael Taht --Beating the Band (Postcards from the Bleeding Edge)

"Lying in the service of power, money and advancement — or simply to avoid embarrassment — is nothing new. Bill Clinton lied about having sex 'with that woman'; Richard Nixon lied about his abuse of power during the Watergate scandal. Lyndon Johnson lied about American destroyers being attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin. What is different today — thanks in part to around-the-clock media coverage and the peculiar American habit of making celebrities of the fallen — is that kids see lies, half-truths and hype not as aberrations but as the norm.... They weren’t born that way. They learned it from us." Susan E. Tiff --Will Today’s Pinocchio Culture Become the Norm? (Cantonrep)

Thanks, Jim.

"I am having trouble remembering the last time I was bored. You must realize that I'm alone with myself which is endlessly fascinating!" William Shatner --Quotable Quotes (WilliamShatner.com)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

And, while I have the attention of the Trek Classic fans, here's James Lileks's Best 404 Message Ever (It's a reference to the Star Trek episode "The Corbomite Manoeuver", in case the uninitiated are wondering.)

Update: 24 July. That should be "The Doomsday Machine." What was I thinking when I wrote that?

"I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" flard --Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom (SlashDot)

Replies to this post on Slashdot range from flame-bait to rather interesting. I didn't see any brilliant new suggestions in the comments I read, but it is interesting to see how these Slashdotters construct the "computers in the writing classroom" issue.

At UWEC, my fresh comp students were in the computer room three hours a week, and in the regular classroom two hours. But the room was a public lab that we had to reserve for teaching. Students who weren't in the class had a habit of marching in and taking a seat. A few students who sat in the back this year said they were distracted by the interlopers, and certainly whenever for a few moments I wanted to stop the keyboard clicking in order to have a brief discussion, or asked a student to read from his or her paper, the presence of strangers in the room was really disruptive.

Another huge problem with teaching in the UWEC labs is that the students were completely isolated from everyone except the people to their right and left. They couldn't see around their monitors (and reguarly tried to hide behind them in order to avoid being called on), and they couldn't hear each other over the whirring fans.

The classroom where I did my teaching demonstration at Seton Hill has recessed computer monitors, and I found it much, much easier to interact.

Because students are human, they will occasionally zone out and goof off. They will IM each other, check their mail, and play games. I really didn't mind that -- I learned to be generally tolerant of a certain amount of background noise (since some students used their computer during lectures to keep notes or to review the assigned readings). And the absence of clicking was generally a good sign that I had their attention... when the material was not riveting, even the most dedicated students started clicking just a little bit... and that would be a good sign that we needed a change of pace.

There were some weeks when I didn't really require three hours in the lab, so the presence of computers was distracting; and some weeks when the students wanted more lab time.

Pale Fire: Bloggers are both Kinbote and Shade (Literacy Weblog)

“Jerz's Literacy Weblog” has been classified as a “research blog,” even though I think of it as a teaching tool and memory aid.

My blogging sometimes reminds me of the obsessive behavior of Professor Charles Kinbote, the protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Kinbote compulsively catalogues every minute environmental detail, not in his own life, but in the life of poet John Shade, whose work is the subject of Kinbote’s research.

I should say more precisely that Shade’s environment is the subject of Kinbote’s research; spying through the window of Shade’s study, Kinbote records exactly when Shade composes each line of poetry, indexed against exactly what was happening in Shade’s life at the time.

In keeping a blog, I am both my own Kinbote and my own Shade; I peer over my own shoulder at my work, and occasionally catch glimpses of myself.

"Emerson was himself a sort of group blogger in The Dial, a magazine he founded with Margaret Fuller in 1840. He designed it as a compendium of the 'good fanatics,' like Thoreau, Alcott and Channing in his Concord circle. 'I would not have it too purely literary,' he wrote to Fuller, venting a blogger's ambition. 'I wish we might make a Journal so broad and great in its survey that it should lead the opinion of this generation on every interest and read the law on property, government, education, as well as on art, letters, and religion.'" Christopher Lydon explains why American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is "a man for bloggers to embrace". --A God for Bloggers (Lydon)

"It's not every day you see your teacher naked in the technology room or posing with a cello." -- Charlotte, British schoolgirl who helped organize teacher pinup calendar for charity. --Teachers Strip off for Calendar (BBC)

Uh, I should hope not, Charlotte.

The pictures really aren't that revealing, but this is still just too weird.

The link comes from Jim, who assures me, "Not that we're holding our breath Dennis !!!"

I should note that my Catholic high school had Jello-wrestling fund-raisers. For a year or two, until the sisters who taught at the school objected.

(Pause.)

They called it a waste of food.

(Pause.)

So the next year, it was mud wrestling.

"This special language had its origins in business-speak, and began to spread when Margaret Thatcher insisted that universities should see themselves as businesses, involving ‘processes’ and ‘products’. Such language is fine for the business world, which deals with the definable and quantifiable. As long as the ‘product’ works and sells, they can use whatever language they like about it, however laughably inflated and self-important. But such language is entirely inappropriate to the world of education, for two reasons. First, if students can be processed, produced and packaged like Dairy Lea, their educational experience will be worthless. Second, the ‘product’ of university teaching and research is the articulation of ideas, an activity not best engaged in by downloading pre-packed phrases from the computer in your brain and regurgitating them in no particular order." Peter Jones --Language Barriers: Universities are becoming factories of jargon and illiteracy (Spectator)

Wait a minute... the academic jargon that I find most troubling has nothing whatsoever to do with such concrete terms as "process" and "product".

Update: On KairosNews, Vitia writes a lengthy response to Jones:

So, to sum up: Jones bashes university human resources departments for using corporate language (what other sorts of language do human resource departments use?), but says the problem is the fault of "contemporary literary criticism and social and cultural studies." Huh? Are all the unemployed humanities PhDs suddenly finding work in HR and quoting Judith Butler's notoriously difficult prose in their memoranda?

"This past year has seen the world of Weblogs, aka the blogosphere, grow in power and stature, if not to the general public, then to the other media. So we've created a graphical depiction of what I believe to be the most influential blogs, pushing the direction of media coverage and perhaps even public policy. | The bigger the mouth, the more influential the Weblog. The position of the mouth shows its political orientation (left or right) and whether it's doing more blogging (top) or more journalism (bottom)." Mark Glaser --Mark Glaser's Guide to the Blogosphere (OJR)

"WatchBlog is a multiple-editor weblog broken up into three major political affiliations, each with its own blog: the Democrats, the Republicans and the Third Party (covering everything outside the two major parties)." --WatchBlog: 2004 Election News, Opinion and Commentary (WatchBlog)

This looks interesting -- a three-column blog -- Democrat on the left side, Republican on the right. So far, so good. But covering third-party issues in the center column? I can't really think of any third-party issues that are centrist. Some will be far left, some will be far right; and some times the extremes share a totalitarian vision of enforcement of their ideals, and sometimes the extremes share a libertarian vision of minimal government interference in the lives of its citizens. The one-dimensional layout of the perspectives on this page doesn't match my vision of the political landscape, since it gives so much recognition to third-party voices (compared to the effect the third-party voices actually have on governance).

Of course, that's probably the point of the website, to encourage people to challenge their own perspective, and that is of course a good thing. And, untill we have three-dimensional computer interfaces, no I can't really think of a better way to dispay the ideas... unless you have four columns, but then the fringe views would get even more attention.

Hmm... that reminds me of a political quiz that ranks you on a left-right-libertarian-authoritarian scale.

Update: I found and blogged the political quiz.

"When I was studying at York, reading the plays was part of the curriculum, and then, in the summer, there were a selection of the plays performed in the street (perhaps 15?), conveniently available to watch. Now that I am at Toronto, there are still medieval play recreations regularly available to watch, since the PLS is alive and well. The scholarly study of medieval drama has improved substantially since those early days, as Prof. Klausner made particularly clear in the Vagantes talk." S. Worthen --York Mystery Plays: Update (Owlfish)

Owlfish's blog post is a good overview of what's happening in medieval drama re-creation these days. I haven't exactly been following the field since I left Toronto, though I do tend to my PSim website, and occasionally field e-mails from students and researchers.

"In fact, our language is littered with words that once used to be brands. Escalator, pogo, gunk and heroin are all examples, as is tabloid, which was originally registered by a drugs company in 1884 and came to mean 'small tablet'." --Google Calls in the 'Language Police' (BBC)

This is a light-weight riff on the observation that widespread use of the verb "google" may threaten Google's trademark. Note those quotation marks in the headline... who, exactly, is being quoted? The picture of the roller-skating police officers looks like a psychological scare tactic, but the caption ("Definitely not Rollerblades.") makes it almost defensible.

Incidentally, the term "hoovering" is popular in the UK but not in the US.

It's pretty easy to think of coke, kleenex, band-aid, xerox, etc.

The ancient ossuary ("bone box") marked with an inscription identifying the occupant as "James, brother of Jesus" has been officially declared a fake:

"The varnish covered large areas of the ossuary surface and the patina had burst through the varnish in many places. Both varnish and patina coated a rosette inscribed on the other side of the ossuary. But Goren and Ayalon's meticulous microscopic analysis showed that the letters of the entire Aramaic inscription "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" were cut through the varnish, indicating that they were carved long--perhaps centuries after--the varnish-covered rosette."

Also declared fake was a reputed record of repairs made to the Temple in Jerusalem nearly 3,000 years ago. --Gold Dust and James Bond (Archaeology)

Note to self: If ever planning forgery of important document likely to draw the attention of scholars from around the world, try to get the grammar right.

I previously blogged the Temple record as an example of ancient technical writing, so I'd better set the record straight.

"To some, a blog is the software and the user's experience with the software, and because of that they focus on the technology that makes blogs possible. | To others, blogs are experiential in terms of an individual's relationship to a blog as relationship, whether as an individual or one of a community." --Talk about PHP or Writing? (Weeblog)

This post advocates thinking about blogs as a rhetorical space rather than a user experience. I agree completely that focusing on software instead of what people are trying to accomplish while using that software is a mistake, but the activity of blogging is very different from the conventional writing our students have been asked to do. You have to spend some time letting students familiarize themselves with their new tools, and set a number of milestones that let students see their progress and gauge the amount of effort they will need to invest in order to keep up.

My own enthusiasm about various forms of cybertext sometimes makes students feel that learning the form is easier than it really is; or, they may feel that simply learning the form (that is, simply getting a web page to "work") ought to be enough for a good grade. Asking students to learn a new tool, construct something with it, and also to learn how to think critically about the whole process is not something that easily fits into a one-semester course -- particularly when similar courses are being taught in more vocational settings on the other side of campus.

"He had found the route after discovering a forgotten map in public archives which revealed the secret access from the monastery attic. | The map was a key exhibit in the trial. The attic, reached by a daring climb up exterior walls, led to a steep, narrow stairway and then the secret chamber. A hidden mechanism opened up the back of one of five cupboards in the library." Paul Webster reports on a modern case of "burglarly by ruse and escalade." --Mystery at the Monastery Ends as CCTV Reveals Chamber of Secrets' Daring Thief  (Guardian)

The reference to Harry Potter is lame, but sticking with The Name of the Rose would be a bit too esoteric.

The defense attorney's suggestion that the thief be sentenced to community service cataloguing and restoring the monastary's book collection is just wonderful. The judge fined the guy instead.

Margaret Atwood recalls encountering Animal Farm" as a girl: "I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.... The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. " Margaret Atwood --Orwell and Me (Guardian)

The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century." --Medieval 'Body of Christ' PlayLiteracy Weblog)

Today is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi ("Body of Christ). This website is one of my oldest online resources. I created the first version in C++, and it ran only on Windows. When I demonstrated it as a poster paper at my very first academic conference (almost 10 years ago), I learned just how many medievalists are also mac users. That led me to learn Java.

Google is Already Spidering my New SiteLiteracy Weblog)

My digital move from UWEC to Seton Hill is happening much faster than I had anticipated. My UWEC weblog, which changed several times a day, seems to have encouraged Google's spiders to check out a good chunk of my website on a regular basis. The cache was rarely more than a day behind the pages that updated most frequently, and if I made a minor change to a web page that didn't change frequently, the change was usually in Google's system within a few days.

I've been working on my Seton Hill website for about two months now; it's been "live" all that time, but Google didn't find it because I wasn't linking to it, and nobody else was, either. Now, just a few days after my farewell post to my UWEC blog, Google has found this one, and has so far indexed about 150 pages on the site. That's pretty darn efficient.

While my UWEC site had been dormant for about three weeks, I started posting on it again, in order to encourage the bots, spiders, and real human beings to start visiting it on a regular basis again, and thus perhaps have a bigger audience when the move took place.

I posted the announcement on my old weblog, posted to a pair of interactive fiction news groups, pinged weblogs.com, and e-mailed about four webloggers to inform them of the link change. I really haven't spent much time publicizing the new site, but the response was tremendous.

Now I'd like to watch to see what PageRank does to some pages where my UWEC website was the top hit.

• One of my UWEC pages is the top Google hit for "blurbs," but my Seton Hill site (which has the same content but no off-site publicity) is nowhere in sight.
• I just changed my York Corpus Christi website (another top Google hit) to redirect to the new page, and since Thursday is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Chisti, and this Sunday is the day the modern church will celebrate it, I plan to Google for Catholic and Medieval blogs and send a handful of them a brief note.
• There are already a few links to my new "Literacy Weblog," and at the moment my Seton Hill site is the eighth listed in a Google search. [Update 30 June: Now the Seton Hill version is second.]
• A Google search for "Dennis G. Jerz" brings my UWEC site up first, but my Seton Hill site up fifth. [Update 30 Jun: Now the Seton Hill site is third, but it's not my new home page -- it's the index page for my writing subdirectory.]

At the moment, while Google does seem to be paying some attention to category listings (which at the moment aren't actually filtering things... sorry about that), it hasn't seem to be searching any of the permalinks.

For the record, in my last month at UWEC, the stylesheet I use on my weblog was getting about 1500 hits per week, but my website as a whole was getting just under 50,000 hits per week. So, as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned, the value of my website far overshadows the value of my weblog, but the bots visit my site far more often than it would be necessary to index an archive of online teaching aids.

"Professors are 'in the gist business.' But a vernacular sound bite, no matter how strategically placed in a text or a lecture, won't help students parse scholarly discourse. More important, getting students to write about what they know does not necessarily make them more adept at writing about more "traditional" academic subjects." Glenn C. Altschuler reviews Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff. --A Prof Rips Peer for Failing, Even Refusing, to Communicate (Philly Inquirer)

Thanks for yet another good link, Jim. Even though the review is negative, I want to read this book.

"Norma McCorvey, the woman whose 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case helped make abortion legal in the United States, today petitioned to overturn the historic Roe v. Wade decision. Known for years as just Jane Roe, McCorvey (pictured right) filed the below affidavit in support of a motion in U.S. District Court in Dallas. McCorvey, 55, stated that the landmark case 'was built upon false assumptions' and had 'caused great harm to the women and children of our nation.' McCorvey, who has been stridently pro-life for nearly 10 years, noted that when she filed her original lawsuit 30 years ago, she was unsure of what the term 'abortion' even meant..." --Roe of Roe v. Wade Files to Overturn U.S. Abortion Case (The Smoking Gun)

Just now, I searched Planned Parenthood's website for "McCorvey," but found nothing. While it's understandable that there might not yet be an official response to this breaking news, I find it strange that her name appears nowhere on the site. "Roe" appears 88 times, however, and there is a link to "www.saveroe.com". But here is an intriguing snippet from McCorvey's website, "www.roenonore.org", which may explain why Planned Parenthood would prefer to act as if the real woman behind Roe didn't exist:

In 1995, Norma was baptized and gave her life to God. She literally moved next door from the abortion clinic at which she was working to the national offices of the prominent pro-life organization, Operation Rescue. Later, feeling a need to share her personal message, Norma founded Roe No More Ministry in 1997 with the mission of exposing the lie that is Roe v. Wade.

See older blurbs about abortion language in journalism and abortion on the NOW web site. Pro-choice groups have been fairly successful at promoting language that decreases the gradient between the statements "I am pro-life" and "I am an evil bomber of women's health centers". But now that terrorism is much more a part of the daily lives of Americans, I wonder whether the same rhetoric will work, especially when building an argument against a former clinic worker.

Update, 20 May: Federal court to Roe: No.

On Barger, Books and BlogsLiteracy Weblog)

Unless I'm mistaken, Jorn Barger doesn't seem to have updated his Robot Wisdom weblog in weeks (yeah, yeah, I'm the pot, he's the kettle, I know).

The 2 Blowhards critique of book culture reminds me of "Theory: Write a web-book in a day", a usenet posting by Jorn Barger. Barger responded to my input by telling me that I should go find my own Internet where I wouldn't bother the idealists.

Barger incidentally coined the term "weblog" in a 1997 Usenet posting. The term was met with some snarky responses about bias and yellow journalism, but Barger replied as if the "yellow" comment is a superficial complaint about his choice of background color. Was Barger playing dumb, or did he miss the point of the critique? The exchange reads ambiguously to me.

Barger's Web Resources FAQ of 1999 is similarly terse and provocative -- which is consistent with Barger's casting of himself as a free-floating radical. He has in the past threatened to stop blogging unless he gets consulting work, and he seems to have disappeared from Usenet as well.

"Biographies? Serious travel books? Moneylosers for most of their authors. How so? Well, say you're lucky and your agent nails a $100,000 contract for you for a biography you're dying to write. Sounds good, huh? But run the math: First, subtract the agent's fee (10-15%), and then subtract taxes. You've got to write the book on the, say, $55,000ish that remains. Keep in mind that almost all books take longer to write and publish than expected. But, heck, you're a fast worker -- it'll only take you 3 years. That means you'll be living on $17,000 a year. And wait: you've gotta do some research -- what's a biography without research? Visiting some archives, interviewing whoever's still alive ... Guess where the money for these travels and aventures comes from? Your own pocket." --Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book (2 Blowhards)

For more depressing statistics on how institutions crush our creative fantasies, see "Courtney Love Does the Math," which presents the recording industry execs as a bunch of mean, evil dudes.

Would you use "anymore" as a synonym for "from here on" or "these days"? It's a common regionalism here in Pennsylvania, where I've heard it from people with a wide range of educational backgrounds. (Thanks to Jim, the Electric Eclectic.) --Dialect Survey Results: Harvard)

"I'm looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible. For example, a history class where each student keeps a weblog. Teachers who manage classes with a weblog. My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing? We've already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I want for BloggerCon." Dave Winer --BloggerCon -- Harvard, October 2003Scripting News)

The response was a little snarky when I cross-posted this news to KairosNews, which is, of course, why blogging is so much fun.

"While I'm an admirer of Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, I don't see either of them shooting for literary effects -- rather, they excel by exploring and extending the possibilities of IF. I think my list of 'favorite IF authors' would probably not contain any surprises, but I think Graham Nelson's Jigsaw probably deserves a mention for the clever treatment of the romance, and the way the game manages to bring so many nations and eras to life." Dennis G. Jerz --Dennis Jerz Interview (Interactive Fiction) (Avventure Testuali)

A few months ago, I fired off answers to a few e-mail questions submitted to me by Francesco Cordella, editor of a delightful bilingual interactive fiction fan site. He's now posted the exchange on his site.

"In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation in the world to turn on television...Bhutan's isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day. Is this how we came to live in our Big Brother society, mesmerised by the fate of minor celebrities fighting in the jungle?" Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy --Fast Forward into Trouble (Register)

"I nonetheless found the darknet command line calm and comforting. Not threatening at all. I suppose it had something to do with the rhythms of the interaction, for while I knew the machine was capable of unleashing unthinkable power, I also knew it would sit dormant forever, waiting for my fingers to hit the keys. There was a kind of deep, deep patience in that prompt and cursor, those courier incantations whose art I've now lost. And that deep patience--that sense of time, of scale, of sustainable rhythm--also seems lost now, bulldozed under by the broadband blast of streaming screaming everything." Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --Darknet Nostalgia (Kirschenbaum)

Reading Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" was almost a religious experience for me. Elsewhere, Matt acknowledges that using the term "nostalgia" to refer to the preservation and study of the cybertexts of just a few years ago trivializes this important cultural archaeology.

For some reason, the text of his permalink seems to be black on black -- hit CTRL-A to select all the text on the page.

"Not only is the First Amendment pressed into service at the drop of a hat (especially whenever anyone is disciplined for anything), it is invoked ritually when there are no First Amendment issues in sight. | Take the case of the editors of college newspapers who will always cry First Amendment when something they've published turns out to be the cause of outrage and controversy." Stanley Fish --Free Speech Follies (Chronicle)

Purple BarbieLiteracy Weblog)

I recently re-read Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur, which got me thinking quite a lot about what the landscape of cyberspace will look like when my daugher Carolyn starts exploring it. And just now I found that the link to Brenda Laruel's legendary "Purple-Moon" website forwards to a Barbie website. Of course I knew that Mattel bought out Purple Moon years ago, but really... Barbie just rankles me.

"So perhaps journalists, playing Wizard of Oz for so many years behind the veil of assorted editors, fact-checkers and media executives, are now feeling a bit naked out in the open. It doesn't help that media companies have cut fact-checking down to the bone (if it exists at all). With the Net and bloggers breathing down their necks, journalists will just have to try harder, especially when it comes to quotes." Mark Glaser --Feeling Misquoted? Weblogs, Transcripts Let the Reader Decide  (OJR)

For more fun stuff regarding quotes, see Ann Coulter's observation that an "average guy on the street" named Greg Packer has been quoted about 100 times:

It was easy for the Times to spell Packer's name right because he is apparently the entire media's designated "man on the street" for all articles ever written. He has appeared in news stories more than 100 times as a random member of the public. Packer was quoted on his reaction to military strikes against Iraq; he was quoted at the St. Patrick's Day Parade, the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Veterans' Day Parade. He was quoted at not one – but two – New Year's Eve celebrations at Times Square. He was quoted at the opening of a new "Star Wars" movie, at the opening of an H&M clothing store on Fifth Avenue and at the opening of the viewing stand at Ground Zero. He has been quoted at Yankees games, Mets games, Jets games – even getting tickets for the Brooklyn Cyclones. He was quoted at a Clinton fund-raiser at Alec Baldwin's house in the Hamptons and the pope's visit to Giants stadium.

Is this guy a made-up person, like the theatrical George Spelvin or cinematographcial Alan Smithee?

Update: an AP story, that does not credit Coulter, offers a profile of the oft-quoated Packer, a highway construction worker who enjoys rubbing elbows with celebrities.

"Faced with a limited amount of food, [the developing fetus] has choices about how to use it. Dr Barker's suggestion is that food will be allocated in ways that give an individual the best chance in early life, at the expense of later years when he will have had children and might, indeed, have died of something else.... a fetus takes its cue about what it will eat after it is weaned from its mother's physiology, and adapts accordingly. In this case, disease is caused when the prediction is wrong." --The Child is Father to the Patient  (The Economist)

The editors should brush up on gender-neutral language. It's not just in the headline... it's strange that the fetus is carefully described as "it", while as an adult the same person is described as "he" -- gender is determined at the moment of conception, so this pronoun usage seems both editorially and scientifically inconsistent.

Webloggers kick Trent Lott out of his job! Weblogger Salam Pax gives the best on-the-scene reports from Iraq! Webloggers take down the top management at The New York Times! Well, two out of three ain't bad.... But most journalists -- if not the public -- couldn't keep their eyes off the train wreck and continued to follow Romenesko during the scandal." --For Bloggers, NYT Story Was Fit to Print (OJR)

It's good to be back... my new permanent digital home isn't up and running yet, but I'm back online after my move from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania.