Personal: March 2004 Archive Page

Remediate The Alamo!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I had the pleasure this afternoon of playing hooky from the 4Cs, and accompanying two Canadians on a visit to The Alamo.

My wife and I had visited San Antonio (among other Texas cites) during our low-budget honeymoon (10 years ago this July), and I really wished I could have had the whole family with me -- the Riverwalk is so pleasant, and my son Peter (age 6) would enjoy the military history.

I had no idea that San Antonio is gearing up for the premiere of the new Alamo movie. Street barricades, tents, and movie set lighting were being set up in front of the Alamo. The movie title was etched into a big obelisk shaped like a silhouette of the building's distinctive front, and technicians tested the special effect -- flames shooting through the letters. TV crews were setting up, and photographers were prowling.

We circled the outside of the building, and caught the ending of a presentation delivered by Alamo employee Pete Huertas, who delivered a stirring oral rendition of the battle, told from the prospective of the American defenders who died in after sustaining a 12-day artillery barrage from Santa Anna. The most notable figures are Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, and the young Col. Travis -- the latter of whom is undisputably the favorite here in Texas.

After attending two days of conference papers delivered by experts in rhetoric and communication -- some of whom mumbled into their notes, apologized in every other sentence for how badly their presentation was going, cut themselves off in the middle of their presentation without even starting in on the conclusion, or went way over time (thus excluding the possibility of questions from the audience) -- seeing a good rhetorical performance was a welcome relief.

Don't get me wrong -- it wasn't every presentation that was bad. (For the bloggers who are reading this, don't worry, I wasn't thinking about your presentation... all the blog-related talks have been good, and most of the others as well.)

Huertas, standing outside, off to one side of the complex, gestured expansively towards the church building, where Davey Crockett's Tennessee volunteers planned to retreat after Santa Anna's forces entered the compound. He described Santa Anna's motions from the perspective of the Americans trapped in the fort, attempting to place us all back in history.

His presentation did not vilify Santa Anna and his Mexican forces, but it did glorify the Americans. He emphasized the desperate messages that Travis sent out to the regional and state authorities, pleading for reinforcements; and he emphasized the government's failure in coming to help. I explained to my Canadian companions the unique history of the Republic of Texas, formerly an independent nation, and still a fiercely independent culture, suspicious of the value of depending on the government rather than on independence and ingenuity.

Huertas told me he was a junior teacher for 23 years. He gave up on the state educational system because he said it was geared towards teaching students to pass tests, rather than expanding their minds.

When I mentioned the delicate cultural role of interpreting the historical events surrounding the siege of the Alamo, in an increasingly multicultural society that may not wish to hear the same messages in which the losing American forces are glorified and the winning Mexicans are pretty much faceless and nameless. (except for Santa Anna himself), Huertas responded that he wanted to "go ahead with what I know to be true, in spite of Hollywood."

At this point, Huertas' boss saw me taking notes, and Huertas told me that Alamo employees have been told not to talk to all the reporters who are here to cover the Hollywood premiere.

Later, in a museum setting in one of the side buildings, volunteer docent Max Knight gave a more objective description of the battle, carefully sourcing and qualifying all his claims about where the bodies of Travis, Bowie, and particularly Crockett were found. Bowie was ill upon his arrival at the Alamo, and quickly turned command over to the young Travis. Legendary accounts of Bowie's death have him whipping out his eponymous bowie knife (which, according to one exhibit, is credited with killing Dracula in Bram Stoker's Dracula) and defending himself to the death; but Knight drew our attention to the lenght of the Mexican bayonets and pikes, and asked whether we really thought a bowie knife would be much use. The Mexican accounts of Bowie's death had him shaking in fear beneath his blankets. Knight said that Bowie would indeed probably have been shivering from his sickness, and may have been able to fire the pistols Crockett gave him, but that's all we know for sure. (He dismissed the story supplied by a woman who claimed to have been a nurse tending to Crockett at the end of the battle.)

Knight noted that Disney's movie presents Crockett surviving the siege, not torching the powder kegs and dying in a heroic explosion, as in John Wayne's portrayal). Texans can be very possessive of the stories about their icons; and since Crockett is on record as giving a speech promising that he would defend The Alamo to the death, his survival (and subsequent execution) problematizes that legendary material.

The convention floor is closing now... more later.

Update, 27 March: Something I didn't notice when I was here before was a monument bearing a poem in traditional Chinese characters, donated in 1914 by Shiga Shigetaka, who saw parallels between the siege of the Alamo and the siege of Nagashino Castle in 1575.

If you're an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. --Henry Farrell --Academics and Blogging (Crooked Timber)

Beware: bloggers do love to blog about their blogs, so here goes...

1. What prompted you to start blogging?
   
   

   I had started developing a collection of online writing resources in 1996, and by early 1999 I was having trouble keeping them organized in several overlapping navigation schemes. I wanted a central location where I could post links to new or recently updated handouts, and in order to give people (presumably my own students and other instructors looking for online resources) a reason to bookmark that page I thought I would create what we would now call a filter (that is, a site with little personal commentary, the main purpose of which was to send readers off to interesting things to do elsewhere). The wayback machine archived how my protoblog looked in June, 1999.
   
   As a literature Ph.D. student teaching technical writing in a liberal arts school, I felt a desire to connect the worlds of technology and humanities. After a former colleague e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, I brazenly copied the form. On July 20, 1999, I posted something about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that I was writing that entry on the anniversary -- so I added the date. Throughout 1999, I kept the A & L Daily signature "[more]" link, though I remember being frustrated by it for some time before I started using meaningful words from the body of the blurb.
   
   At first I mostly featured links to writing centers and my own online handouts, but as I realized that my page was attracting more attention from the outside world than from my students, I created one column for humanities and one for technology, and just posted whatever I thought was interesting in either column. I started e-mailing the webmasters of resources I thought were valuable, telling them that they were my "link of the day". I had already been advocating the value of what I called annotated lists of links (I first drafted that handout in 1997), but I don't think I really convinced any of my students to get excited about the possibility.
   

   All this time, I was coding my blog by hand, without any sort of automated tools (well, I did use a WYSIWYG editor). I did later create some PERL tools to automate the process of shifting entries from the home page to the archives, and I later created a form that let me add to the database over the Web, though in order to publish I still had to drive to the office and hit a button that ran a script which copied files from my hard drive to the university server. Bleah.
   
   My site didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, when it appears exactly once, when I linked to the Feb 2000 Wired article noting the boom in weblogging.
   
   In 2001, I blogged 10 items that I later classified under a "weblog" category. It wasn't until fall, 2001, when two students chose weblogs as the subject of term projects that I seriously considered the form, and actually started blogging about it. Technical writing major Jan Carroll created what turned into a very popular blog devoted to September 11 poetry, and CS major Chris Warren, who had already been keeping a personal weblog and photoblog (and from whom I coincidentally just got an e-mail a little while ago), wrote a term project on identity in weblogs. Both students were having difficulty finding relevant scholarship, though I noticed early on that journalists seemed to be paying much closer attention to the phenomenon than my English composition and technical writing colleagues.
   
   

2. And what keeps you going?
   
   

   I went back on the job market, this time trumpeting my weblog and other new media experience, in order to see what would happen. I ended up as Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism.
   
   

3. Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship?
   
   Yes -- at first only indirectly. My first "annotated list of links" was a bibliography of websites devoted to interactive fiction (text adventure games); at one point I added print resources and the result was published in a journal. I had an article called "On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy" scheduled to appear in "Dichtung Digital" a few days after Google announced its purchase of Blogger, so I spent the weekend updating it... Although I ended up not being able to attend the conference, my paper "(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit'" from last year's BlogTalk is being published in the proceedings.
   
   
   
4. If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not?
   

   
   Not applicable to me.
   
   

5. Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?
   

   
   Fodder for my own blog... Seriously, I also I value them as ways to connect with distant people who travel to conferences more frequently than I can (what with my two small kids, "all-but-dissertation" wife and a heavy teaching load), and as ways to connect with my students. This term I'm using blogs in three of my four classes and also supervising the development of the online student paper, so I'm thinking quite a bit about pedagogical blogging. Our school is big on getting students to use PowerPoint, but I can't stand that medium, and instead require students to blog their oral presentations. They present by going up to the front of the room and clicking through the links in their blog entry. That usually makes the oral presentation go better, since students don't have to take notes on the content; it also makes the network of student blogs richer -- I've managed to create a culture where students discourage each other from saying "I'm putting this on my blog because my teacher told me to," and students are challenging each other to make their blog entries interesting for their regular readers. Of course, some students only blog when they have to, and others probably drop my class because the whole blogging thing is too freaky for them.
   

   On a personal level, other than videos for the kids, I watch almost no TV, preferring instead blogging, reading, or computer games.
   

Very Tired on a Friday Afternoon. But it's a good tired.

I just heard that my proposal, "Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review," has been accepted for the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this coming October.

Seton Hill University featured "information literacy" in a faculty seminar at the beginning of the year, but thought the content of that training was too basic to be of much interest or help to me. While I've found my new media activities to be well-supported here, I do expect that I'll have plenty of explaining to do when it comes to annual review time. Now that weblogs are mainstream enough that I can expect my students to "get" blogging without much trouble, I need to start thinking critically about how to present the value of blogging to a generation of scholars who don't automatically go "Wow that's so cool!" when they see a blog. Hence, this conference proposal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I'm still working on "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in Their Academic Weblogs," which I'll be giving at the 4C's next week... I'm behind in my blogging for the Princeton Video Game conference earlier this month, and I've haven't yet managed to unbotch my handling of the paperwork for a conference I attended last August.

What's this? Little voices from several stacks of papers are calling to me... "Grade us! Grade us!"

Back to work.