Humanities: August 2006 Archive Page

Ibsen.net is the official Internet site for Ibsen year 2006 and is by far the largest website about Henrik Ibsen on the world wide web, as regards both sheer volume of information and number of users. --Ibsen 2006 (Ibsen.net)

A portal for world-wide activities recognizing the 100th year of Ibsen's death. A theatre faculty member just called me up to ask whether I'd be interesting in participating in an evening program on Ibsen. (I said yes.)

Among the dark corners where Dr Baker's thesis - titled Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek - shines light is the changing link between the starship Enterprise's intergalactic adventures and the real world's space race.

Shatner's monologues were inspired by the visionary speeches of JFK, advocating greater exploration. Thirty years on, the roles were reversed, with astronauts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration guest-starring on Star Trek spin-offs to promote their underfunded existence. --Adam Morton --Star Trek's a thesis (The Age)

Come on, headline writer. You can do better than that.

PDK Question (n=500) "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" Results: 37% Favor 55% Oppose 5% Neither Favor or Oppose 2% Don't Know/Refused

Adjusted Question (n=500) "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, to attend using public funds?? Results: 60% Favor 33% Oppose 5% Neither Favor or Oppose 2% Don't Know/Refused

--New Evidence Calls PDK School Choice Poll into Question (Friedman Foundation)

This is a great example of how a subtle change in the wording of a question can significantly affect the way the public responds.

Think of that the next time you hear a politician or a TV talking head recite the numbers from a poll.

1. Andy Warhol, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, and Lee Marvin have always been dead.

2. They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors. --Mindset List for the Class of 2009 (Beloit College)

Always worth a read.

When I watched "Sesame Street" in the '70s, the human cast and the Muppets were quirky adults who didn't talk down to me with baby voices. Now the human cast gets almost no airtime, and the show is dominated by Elmo, Baby Bear and, now, Abby Cadabby -- preschoolers enamored by their own adorable stupidity.

The lesson they teach -- in opposition to Oscar, Big Bird, Grover or Bert -- is that bland neediness gets you stuff much more easily than character. --Joel Stein --Elmo Is an Evildoer (L:A Times)

E is for Elmo evil. F is for flamebait.

Is Elmo the Jar-Jar Binks of the Sesame Street franchise?

Rescue workers and staff at the Debelis Corporation used cocoa-butter to thin out the chocolate and pull him free. --US man survives chocolate ordeal (BBC)

Thanks to Rosemary, who notes the final line: "The accident involved dark chocolate. "

I am a very visual and active learner. I draw circles around words or phrases, highlight pertinent passages, make marginal marks and notes, or draw small doodles so I can visualize a concept. I make arrows that connect similiar ideas, draw stars next to passages that I hope I'll be able to find again, or stick post-it notes on pages I want to visit again. This method of absorbing information does not work with online texts. --Moira Richardson --Bound for Glory - the future of print (Literary Tease)

Within a year of birth, boys and girls also prefer different toys. Boys prefer cars, trucks, balls and guns. Girls prefer dolls and tea sets. Although evolution has clearly not had the opportunity to mould a preference for tea sets, there is evidence from another species which suggests that human infants might be predisposed to prefer toys that have particular adaptive significance to their sex. Several years ago, Melissa Hines, of City University in London, and Gerianne Alexander, of Texas A&M University, gave some vervet monkeys a selection of toys, including rag dolls, pans, balls and trucks. Male monkeys spent more time with the trucks and balls. Females played for longer with the dolls.

Obviously, cultural stereotyping is an improbable explanation for this. Nor could male monkeys have evolved a preference for fire engines. The theory put forward to explain what happened -- and the similar innate preferences of human children -- is that the toys preferred by young females are objects that offer opportunities for expressing nurturing behaviour, something that will be useful to them later in life. Young males, whether simian or human, prefer toys that can be used actively or propelled in space, and which afford greater opportunities for rough play. --The mismeasure of woman (The Economist)

Just over 60 percent of respondents were able to name Bart as Homer's son on the television show "The Simpsons," while only 20.5 percent were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 percent named the fictional planet Krypton, while only 37 percent knew that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun.

Respondents were far more familiar with the Three Stooges -- Larry, Curly and Moe -- than the three branches of the U.S. government -- judicial, executive and legislative. Seventy-four percent identified the former, 42 percent the latter. --Snow White's dwarfs more famous than US judges: poll (Reuters)

Of course, this article is cherry-picking the juiciest quotes that make the best contributions to a "Let us all weep for the future of the country" article that publicizes the services of the pollsters.

If there was any question that Americans did well on, it's not reported in this little shocker story.

More than a dozen accusations of staged or doctored photographs have made their way through various Web sites in the past several weeks. None has been treated by the news outlets as seriously as the original Reuters incident, which saw the photographer Adnin Hajj fired and over 900 of his photos removed from the Reuters wire list. But numerous other outlets - including the BBC, The New York Times and AP - have been forced to recall photos or change captions following inaccuracies pointed out in online forums. --Sheera Claire Frenkel --Reutersgate strikes other news outlets (Jerusalem Post)

It looks like the mainstream media have learned from Rathergate.

It's important to understand that there is not just a single fraudulent Reuters photograph, nor even only one kind of fraudulent photograph. There are in fact dozens of photographs whose authenticity has been questioned, and they fall into four distinct categories.

The four types of photographic fraud perpetrated by Reuters photographers and editors are:

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place. --Reuters Commits Four Types of Fraud (zombietime)

Because I don't follow the political blogs, this subject kind of crept up on me.

Warning -- some of the photos on the page are disturbing, but it's precisely the emotional impact of the photos that makes the issues of digitally altered and staged photos so important.

Note the two different shots of the same Lebanese woman lamenting the loss of her home in the immediate aftermath of attacks two weeks apart. It's possible that someone misidentified the photo, or that an entrepreneurial freelancer misrepresented the facts to make an additional sale. But the New York Times sequence that in one picture shows a dust-free young man clutching his hat under his arm, with no visible injuries, lying in such a manner that he appears to be pinned under a small metal pole, looks very interesting when contrasted with other images from the same sequence, showing what looks like the same man wearing his cap on his head, assisting with the rescue efforts.

Then there is "The Passion of the Toys," the dismissive title critics have given to a series of photos showing some remarkably undamaged and dust-free toys in the foreground of photos that show the aftermath of military attacks. A similiarly dramatic photo shows a mannequin wearing a wedding dress in the midst of the destruction.

The author writes, "Now, of course there is a real war going on, and there is real damage, and authentically tragic scenes. No one is denying that. So, with all the actual honest footage of unstaged war imagery floating around, why is Reuters resorting to supplementing its coverage with obviously fake photos?"

Here's an interesting quote, credited to a comment posted on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs:

Every time, if an Israeli is hurt, it was a "rocket" that did it; if a Lebanese/Hizb is hurt, "Israel" did it. Humans hurt Lebanese, but inanimate objects hurt Israelis, according to Reuters.

I didn't check the Reuters captions myself, but this is a good example of where bias can creep in. A similar controversy erupted in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster, when photo captions from one news agency described black people as looting, while a different news agency described a different scene with subjects who are not black (it looked like a white man and a Hispanic woman) as having taking food that they found. (See "You Say 'Looting,' I Say 'Finding'"

I'll also mention that "mute point" is an "eggcorn" -- a new category of writing mistake that linguists have identified and my fellow college teachers might find useful in responding to student writing. I'm certainly glad to have a new tool that helps me climb down from the high horse I have occasionally mounted in 10-plus years of teaching creative writing, essay writing, business writing, and you-fill-in-the-blank-here writing. It's nice to have a way of explaining mistakes that doesn't make students feel stupid.

[...]

All eggcorns makes sense on some level. For example, the eggcorn "girdle one's loins" is far more understandable than the archaic "gird one's loins." "Free reign" -- an extremely common misspelling -- expresses a similar laxness to "free rein," and there's a kind of exclamatory kismet between "whoa is me!" and "woe is me!" --Mark Peters --Like a Bowl in a China Shop (Chronicle)

I just recently used "free reign" in a blog entry. Whoa is me!

You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot of prejudice and superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words: "The female of man. See HOMO.") If you look up "coffee preparation" on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on Espresso, to a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want to consult before buying. There is also a page on the site dedicated to "Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia" (Stalin's birth date, the true inventor of the safety razor).

[...]

Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night's party or to next season's iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. --Stacy Shiff --Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? (The New Yorker)

Dodge Intrepid is hammy and satirical, following the adventures of a Beaver County librarian and his Sancho-like intern. The mode is decidedly retro, and the company has eschewed any kind of seriousness. If there's a blue note, Rubino says it's this: "My ulterior motive is to promote the library system, really." --Radio Serials Revived Via Podcast (Back Stage)

I've gotten a big kick out of Dodge Intrepid, a retro podcast that pokes fun at -- and does a great job recapturing the fun of -- 40s radio serials.

One of my favorite bits is when Dodge gets punched, and has to deliver a line that tells the audience what happened. He'll shout "My square jaw!" I burst out laughing while listening to that one in an airport. Other characters with different physiques will deliver variations of that line.

In one scene, our heroes have been captured by an Italian Futurist, who leaves them to be executed by a Rube Goldberg contraption (the operation and progress of which has to be conveyed through dialogue).

I do feel that in places the pace could be tightened, and the story is starting to run into the same problem that science fiction shows have when a technological plot device (in this case, time travel) is used inconsistently. But the point of the series is to have fun with the adventure genre, so I'm not about to start geeking out on the time travel plot holes. (I did take an undergraduate elective course on the philosophy of time travel... Nooo! Must... resist... urge... must... not... parade... obscure... knowledge....)

Okay, I'm feeling better now.

The characters are developing nicely, and that's what's the read draw for me. Oh, and the fake commercials that break up the action (most of them featuring characters from the show enjoying the various fake products) are themselves worth the download.

Avid SHU blogger Mike Rubino is the narrator and voices most of the recurring characters (other than Dodge himself, that is).

Computers & Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue, Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming

While video gaming has been a strong cultural force since the advent of the popular coin-operated arcades of the 1970s, it is only within the last few years that video/computer gaming has been an academic focus: there is a lot of catch-up work to do. The average age of gamers has been steadily increasing, as has the number of dedicated players. Inevitably, this dedication to gaming will have -- if it does not already -- a profound impact on learning and literacy. Video/computer games are historically- and culturally-situated texts that operate in particular social contexts significant to composition theory and praxis. --CFP: Computers & Composition -- ''Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming''

Matthew S. S. Johnson sent me this via e-mail and asked me to help publicize it. I posted the full text on KairosNews.

The following list is made up of a few things I've noticed in a lot of the interactive fiction games I've tested or tried out. I've tried these games for reasons I can't entirely fathom; admittedly, it's easier and leaves fewer disfiguring scars than self-flagellation. It is not necessarily any less painful though. --Michael J. Coyne --First-Timer Foibles

From a string of good narrative-related links on Grand Text Auto.

You rarely see, for example, a faculty member from an Ivy League university alongside one from a community college on a Modern Language Association panel, regardless of any research interests they might share. That shows the dangerous classism that pervades academe, something I admittedly did not see for myself until I began teaching at a "second tier" institution.

That classism is dangerous not because those of us who are categorized as less elite may be slighted at conferences or by journals or seminar leaders. It is dangerous because it divides us -- faculty members and students alike -- at a moment when financing for higher education is eroding, when grants for professional development and research are shrinking, when even the largest and most prestigious universities are still cutting faculty positions.

It is critical for the well-being of the academy and the students we serve that faculty members find common ground and work together. One way to do that is to work together locally; that is, for institutions -- public and private, large and small -- in a given area to capitalize on their proximity and benefit from one another's strengths. Hence my immodest proposal: Professors within a given region would swap jobs for a semester or a year with colleagues at institutions with different Carnegie ratings. --Lisa Bothson --A Cure for Academic Classism (Chronicle)

Not very practical, but an interesting suggestion. I've blogged before about the life I might have had if certain job interviews had gone better or worse than they did, and I had ended up somewhere very different from where I am teaching now.

Until recently entertainment reporting was in the hands of respectful, publicist-friendly titles such as Vanity Fair and The Los Angeles Times. Indeed, the latter recently opened one of its celebrity articles with this gem of a sentence: "One doesn't so much interview Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as sit back and watch as their friendship, wordplay and enthusiasm for their craft plays itself out."

The internet has changed all that. Today the real stories are more likely to appear on the websites of The Smoking Gun, the Drudge Report or the TMZ (which got the Gibson scoop). These websites deal in tips, not interviews. They owe no favours to publicists. And they have more in common with (and more respect for) the British red-top press than The New York Times. --Chris Ayres --Be shocked! Be amazed! See Hollywood on a website near you (The Times Online)

The blog hurt the administration in two key ways: First, administrators were unable to focus on correcting the problems that led to the creation of the blog, and second, the administration's clumsy and futile efforts to combat the blog simply compounded the anger and contempt on campus. --Daniel W. Barwick --The Blog That Ate a Presidency (Inside Higher Ed)

Good analysis of an administrative train wreck that started because a college board responded poorly to a controversy started on a blog.

To be fair, anonymous complaints are hard to deal with, but ignoring a forum -- even an unfair forum -- is a sign that those who wish to abuse it will have free reign rein.

Barwick has a good solution: "Clearly what Alfred State needed (and other colleges probably need as well) is a blog that is confidential, accessible, not regulated for content, and yet not completely public."

Of course, if anything in the "confidential" blog becomes contentious, it's a simple matter for warring factions to copy and paste material to other forums, so it's probably better to think of such a community as gated, rather than the content as confidential.