Academia: January 2008 Archive Page

While walking an introductory class through a close reading of "The Defense of Fort McHenry" (better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner,") I noted that a student had wondered whether the appearance of "In God We Trust" on US currency had anything to do with the inclusion of a similar phrase, "In God is our Trust," in the poem that became the U.S. national anthem.

I confessed to the student that I didn't know the answer, and suggested that the next time a thought like that occurs to her, I'd love to have her share her findings with the class.

An hour or so later, that student showed up outside my office, with a printout from the U.S. Department of Treasury website, having found (and highlighted) the answer. 

That wasn't the only reason she wanted to see me, but I was still happy that she had taken the initiative to follow up on a class discussion, and that she wanted to share with me what she had found.

The other poem I chose for the day was Jabberwocky, which I've known by heart since high school, so it was a lot of fun to do the oral interpretation while supporting a quick-and-dirty reading of Carroll's famous nonsense poem as a version the hero's quest, and Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty as a spoof of the scholastic tendency to consult an authority (Humpty Dumpty, who "can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet"), rather than encouraging Alice's instinctive reaction: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"

A close professional contact who regularly takes on student interns shared this list of guidelines, which she has found necessary to include when orienting a new intern to the routine of office work.

Although the site is a non-profit educational organization, and thus the environment is more relaxed and forgiving than it might be in the typical business setting, I have seen student interns wearing sweats over a team uniform (with bags of gear piled in the corner).

Millennial students are very social creatures, and they are used to being able to choose how to channel their enthusiasm and interests. Students who are used to multi-tasking may be tempted to fill up slow spots with Facebook or Youtube, which may be acceptable in a work-study position that asks them to check out library books or just make sure people don't vandalize the computer labs. But most entry-level jobs require stretches of solitary vigilance -- by the telephone in the front office, in the hall waiting to escort a visitor to and from a meting, or simply waiting to get a word in edgewise while their immediate supervisor conducts routine business with a constant stream of customers or co-workers.

Seeing exactly what my contact felt had to be spelled out is a useful starting point for the professional development component of my "Intro to Literary Study" class.

1. The Center's daily dress code is casual business attire--no jeans or sports clothing.
2. The dress code for Center events is formal business attire, i.e. suit.
3. When you are working, friends may not visit you.
4. Cell phone use during work is strongly discouraged.
5. You are expected to focus on your work, make good use of your time, and avoid interrupting your supervisor or fellow students unnecessarily.
6. Please greet visitors, welcome them to the Center and ask how you can help.
7. When answering telephones, please use this format:  "Hello. You have reached [ORGANIZATION NAME]. [YOUR NAME] speaking. How may I help you?"
8. If you are stuck on a project or need direction, you are expected to make this known in a timely manner.
9. Remember that no task is too small. All tasks are important to the functioning of the Center. You are expected to do your best work on all assignments, and to contribute to the smooth functioning of the Center.
10. Team work is important to the success of all Center events. All interns are expected to take part in planning major events and to contribute ideas for carrying out projects effectively. When possible, you will have opportunities for decision-making and supervision.
11. Interns are expected to act professionally in representing the Center to other departments or even people from outside the University.
12. If you are unable to work during your scheduled hours, you must communicate this to your supervisor in a timely manner. Missing work or events without communicating with the supervisor is not acceptable or professional behavior.
13. You are expected to keep all work areas neat and organized. File folders are to be returned to their proper places before you leave work.
14. You are expected to document progress in planning and carrying out activities on the proper forms in the event folders.
15. You should maintain a folder under your name (Smith, Mary Spr08) on the Center computer that you use. Projects should be organized within your folder by title so that you supervisor or another student staff member can access materials in your absence. You should log in under the account provided to you, not your own account.

Filed away to read on a rainy day (after I've cleared some big projects from my to do list): Jonathan Bate

The original manuscripts of Shakespeare's works do not survive: the sole extant composition in his hand is a single scene from Sir Thomas More, a multi-authored play that cannot really be described as 'his'. Shakespeare only survives because his works were printed.

The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century, when the model for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary and historical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The recovery of those texts had been at the core of the humanist Renaissance. The classical procedure was to establish which surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to get as close as possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors of transcription which had been introduced by successive scribes in the centuries before the advent of print. As Shakespeare began to be treated like a classic, the same procedure was applied to his texts. The eighteenth century also witnessed his rise to the status of national genius, icon of pure inspiration. That image required the imagining of a single perfect original for each play. Shakespeare couldn't be allowed second thoughts - that would imply some deficiency in his first thoughts. So it was that over time, there emerged a preference for early texts over later ones and a belief that the editor's job was to restore a single lost original, something approximating to the text as it came 'pure' from the hand of Shakespeare.

We are very unlikely ever to recover the manuscripts of the plays as Shakespeare originally wrote them (the ambition of the 'new bibiographers'). In the absence of surviving promptbooks, let alone dictographic or video records, we will never recover the plays as they were first performed (the ambition of the 'Oxford revisionists').

All plays change in time, metamorphosing as they go from writing to rehearsal to performance to revival. Many agencies (the playwright and his collaborators, the actors, the book-keepers and scribes, the compositors and proof-readers) were involved in the creation of what we call a Shakespearean text. Despite a hundred years of advanced bibliographic investigation, there is still a remarkable lack of scholarly consensus about the nature of the copy for many of Shakespeare's plays.... Perhaps it would be best to abandon the idea that any one text represents the 'definitive' version of a Shakespeare play. After all, the quest for a 'definitive' text, based on a 'single lost original', was premised on the principles of classical and Biblical textual criticism. It is not necessarily appropriate for more modern literary and especially dramatic texts.

Of course it's not scientific, but it's fun. Virgil Griffith:

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, "Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that."? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

Well, here's one idea.

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)! Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

Jeffrey R. Young (Chronicle):

The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd. Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some expertise.... "We are a peer-review press--we're always going to want to have an honest peer review," says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. "The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model."

So the experiment will provide a side-by-side comparison of reviewing--old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the new method "blog-based peer review." Each day he will post a new chunk of his draft to the blog, and readers will be invited to comment. That should open the floodgates of input, possibly generating thousands of responses by the time all 300-plus pages of the book are posted. "My plan is to respond to everything that seems substantial," says the author.

Michael Bracken offers practical tips to new writers. Later this week I'll begin teaching Seton Hill's "Intro to Literary Study" class again... it's often the first class in which the English majors get a taste of what it means to write fiction for a college-level class. That means I emphasize basic stuff such as how to punctuate quoted speech, and the difference between "correcting the mistakes your teacher has circled for you" and "improving a draft through revision."  But Bracken offers an even more basic set of gripes.

New writers often ask questions about how to format manuscripts, and established writers and editors provide a variety of opinions about the "right" way and the "wrong" way to do it. I happen to prefer the format established post-typewriter/pre-personal computer, but I realize time, technology, and training changes everything.

I'm no Luddite. I worked for a large book and periodical publisher that was accepting electronic manuscripts back in the 1980s before Macintoshes existed and when electronic manuscripts arrived on 8" Wang disks that truly were floppy! I worked with and taught GenCode, a precursor to today's generic mark-up languages (HTML, SGML, etc.)., and today I write, edit, and design printed and electronic publications using a variety of word processing and page layout programs on both Macintoshes and Windows-based PCs.

So allow me a moment to play crabby editor while I bitch about a few of the most common mistakes I see writers make when preparing electronic manuscripts, and my complaints have nothing to do with font or typesize.

I've got a pounding headache and I'm typing this while stretched out on my sickbed in the basement (where my wife banishes me every time I get ill).  I'm sure this isn't a relapse of the pneumonia that laid me low last term, but I'm not at all happy that this is hitting me on the last weekend before the spring term starts.  When I'm sick, the part of my brain that does objective evaluation shuts down, so I'm no good at grading papers or figuring out whether this assignment should be worth 5% or 10% of the course grade.  But I can philosophize and ruminate.  I suppose this will help me deal with the anxiety I feel over getting sick (again).

After students have had the chance to revise a few essays, I ask for a show of hands as I ask a series of questions...

1. "How many of you find it easy to fix all the mistakes I mark?"
2. "How many of you find it easy identify and fix errors in the passages that I haven't marked?"
3. "How many of you prefer to have someone else catch the mistakes for you?"
4. "Now imagine you are the editor of a magazine, and you have two submissions on your desk. Both are about the same quality. One has typos in almost every line, and you'll have to spend hours getting it ready for publication. The other submission has no glaring technical errors, and looks like it would be ready to go almost immediately. Which one would you publish?"

I've done that in the past, as part of my attempt to get students to pay attention to, and take advantage of the opportunity when their professor gives them the opportunity to revise a paper. I first thought I should blog Bracken's essay because I wanted my students to be able to read it, but now I'm not so sure. 

One of the biggest frustrations about being a writing teacher is that many students don't take full advantage of the opportunity to revise.  If a student's draft is patchy and full of typos, then instead of spending my time engaging with the student's ideas, I spend it circling typographical errors and noting missing words, and I never get to spend that deep time talking about a student's ideas. (Yes, I can add a few lines after the final draft comes in, but I know students are most motivated to learn from detailed comments when they are working on a final draft. If they have, in their minds, "finished" a paper, I have to shift into a much more general "Next time, try doing more of this and less of that," rather than actually carrying on a conversation with them about the ideas they have raised.

But I worry that perhaps my desire to get students to value the revision process has instead come across as an attempt to tear them down. 

Making the shift to college can be shocking.  Many who have a talent for language have coasted through high school English -- where teachers rewarded students for using fancy vocabulary words, for being able to summarize the plot of the literary works they read and for demonstrating an ability to apply the stories to their own lives.  For many students who are just starting out college, only the dumb or lazy students have to work hard to earn good grades; the ones who are "bright" and "smart" get those good grades naturally. So they can be shocked to find out that being "bright" doesn't earn you many points, and even "smart" kids have to work to earn a B.

This lesson is not a particularly pleasant one to teach. Professional editors have every right to be frustrated by newbie authors whose simple mistakes waste time.  As a teacher, it's my job to help get those newbies ready for the real world, where crabby editors don't always have time to be nice when they say "no."  One of my teaching personas is the crabby editor, though I try to reserve that for the upper-level students who should know better.

I thought initially that Bracken's blog entry would permit me to say, "See, it's not just me being crabby, here's a successful author and influential editor saying the same things I'm trying to tell you."  But instead, I think I'll try to bring this idea out of the class via a discussion, where students call out ideas and I write them on the board.

Since it's a spring class, the students will already have had a chance to notice what their first semester was like, though they may not have had the chance to reflect on what their experiences mean. It would be faster to start with a list of dos and dont's, but rather than giving them a list of orders that they are compelled to follow, it would be much better if they could think of me as a resource for how to solve a problem.  

This kind of self-criticism is particularly challenging to students who haven't yet taken a creative writing class, and therefore haven't really experienced what a solid, meaty critique can do for their writing (once they get over the initial blow to their egos). But if I try to force this lesson on them before they're ready to hear it, they might get disillusioned, and they may not give me their best work thereafter (for fear that I'll respond too harshly).

Finding the right balance between crushing realism and uncritical praise is important enough that it's worth taking the time to do it carefully. So this year I will try drawing some collective wisdom out of the students' shared experiences.

When I went to grad school, I imagined that I would teach much the same way as I was taught -- via lectures.  But students today are far more connected with each other than students were 20 years ago.  My students are skilled at interacting with each other, and they regularly draw on their group communication skills to get all sorts of personal and social tasks done.

I feel like I'm doing my best work as a teacher when I find that the knowledge is already there, in bits and pieces, distributed across the student network.  The students may have never tried to connect the dots on their own, though they may have generated some tentative conclusions based on the parts of the big picture that they can see.

And the big picture that I need to see is that I've got to face the reality that I'm sick again, and that until I get better, I won't be able to make any meaningful progress on all the obligations I've put on hold.

Okay... now for some rest.

The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word "quizzam," which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect.

That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual "Blog in Blank Verse Day."

From the Chronicle:

On an afternoon this fall, nearly all of the 15 computers were in use, and students stared in concentration -- some gunning down bad guys in Counter-Strike, others strumming along with Guitar Hero. No one was doing any classwork. But the goal of the lab is very much college-related. It is to entice students to take game-design and other IT courses, says John Min, dean of business technologies on the college's campus here. Mr. Min decided to create the Game Pit, as the lab is called, because he noticed that IT enrollment had been falling since 1999. "We need to find ways to get more students," he says. Posters and fliers in the gaming lab list the many computer courses offered, and professors sometimes stop in to tout their courses.

An opinion published in the Robert Morris University student newspaper:

The purpose of a university newspaper is not to depict students or the school in a negative light, but to talk about positive stories, current events, campus activities etc. Now imagine a high school kid looking to come to RMU, a parent wishing to send his/her daughter here...they decide to pick up the December 12th edition of the sentry...front page..."RMU Student Faces Multiple Drug Charges." What a great way to promote the school! This was in very bad taste for a front page article... Speaking for myself and other students I have spoken to, this is our school and we don't want articles like this on the front page of our school newspaper.

I'm the adviser of Seton Hill University's newspaper, and I don't tell the editor what to publish or where to put the stories. I do confess that I have encouraged them to save their heavy-hitting, critical stories for the issues they publish during the regular semester, and to treat the Summer Orientation issue as an opportunity to build community and recruit new staff members.  So the editor does need to exercise tact. Yet, recently the students published an issue with a front-page article about drug abuse on campus, and the university president said she was proud to distribute it to the board members.

Here's the comment I left on the RMU Sentry's website:

A very important function of a university newspaper -- something that a PR office cannot supply -- is giving students the opportunity to practice journalism. And students cannot practice journalism unless they have the editorial freedom to publish stories that will make some people uncomfortable.  Surely RMU already has a venue for publicizing all the positive stories.

Because the student faces a felony charge, and had already been suspended from classes and kicked out of the dorms as per RMU policy, the event seems newsworthy. I would like to have seen evidence that attempts were made to get the accused student's side of the story, but the article does include a quote describing what will happen if the student is found not guilty -- a clear reminder to the public that the courts have not yet heard the case.

Perhaps the author of this letter (Jason?) should join the staff of the Sentry and work his way up to being on the editorial board, where he can help make decisions such as where to place stories, whether to name names, and whether to publish critical letters to the editor without fully identifying the author.

If the students do their jobs as journalists, they will end up publishing stories that upset some people. Reporting that police have charged someone with a crime is not a violation of the suspect's privacy -- it's a matter of public record. Let's imagine that a student paper published a photo of a student being led across campus in handcuffs, when the police ended up realizing they had the wrong person, or for some other reason they released him without filing any charges. That would be ethically questionable.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required)

Billed as a "social-network monitoring service" and marketed exclusively to college athletics departments, YouDiligence was on display at a trade show here during the National Collegiate Athletic Association's annual convention. The program is designed to conduct real-time searches of Facebook and MySpace for up to 500 objectionable words and phrases ranging from profanity to slang used to describe drugs. If it finds anything, it sends an e-mail alert to a designated athletics official containing a link to the offending page.

[...]

At Florida State, coaches and administrators have taken a top-down approach to educating students about the risks of being too carefree on their Facebook and MySpace pages. Mr. Lata and his staff have meetings with every team to talk about those risks. One coach requires all of her athletes to have her as a "friend" on Facebook, so that if they post questionable material, she will know about it.

Hmm... software searching for keywords, or coaches actually getting themselves involved with their players' social lives?

Terry Harpold (Game Studies 7.1) uses Zork as one example in this article.

Common threshold structures of the world - closed doors or windows, elevators, magical portals - often fulfil this dual function. Segmenting spaces of the world in a way that is easily accepted by the player, they may also mask computational latencies (the rendering engine must be given time to catch up, a new portion of code must be loaded into memory) or limits of the game's database (transporting her avatar to a new "level," an elevator also redirects the player's attention away from the fact that there is no inter-level space beyond the elevator's compartment, as nothing there is computationally-defined). Crucially, the threshold matches the program trait to the gameworld trait concurrently, or with such close approximation that their difference is not noticed much. In this and similar moments of play, the user's attention is primarily on the gameworld rather than its software and hardware correlates; there is entanglement, but its expression tends toward a reification of one plane of gameplay. We may say that by some mechanism, which may vary from game to game and in the degree of its openness, the gameworld recaptures traits of hardware or software, repurposing them to its own ends and masking their potential disruption of the world with information that is notionally distinct from it. The back-directed orientation implicit in the term "recapture" is appropriate to the concept because, as I understand it, recapture takes place on the cusp of a sort of crisis in representation: exactly at the moment where entanglement threatens to bring forward the game's determinism by its definite technical situation, that determinism is turned back into the gameworld, so as to seem to be another of its (arbitrary but consistent) rules.

Excellent three-part post from Lisa Spiro. People, this is the kind of thing Vannevar Bush imagined scholars would do when he dreamed up the Memex -- saving each other time by sharing annotated lists.  This blog has landed on my RSS list.  Part 1 and Part 2 are up; I'll add the link to Part 3 when it appears.  (Update: Part 3)

I love reading year-end summaries and lists. Even if the judgments can seem arbitrary, such lists let me know about things I missed and remind me of what matters. Here I offer my own impressions of significant goings-on in and around digital humanities in 2007. Since a lot happened this year, I'll divide these musings into 3 posts. Post 1 will focus specifically on digital humanities initiatives; post 2 on mass digitization, reading, and scholarly communications; and post 3 will examine databases, virtual reality, social networking, and "green" digital humanities, as well as present some simple stats on the ideas that generated the most buzz. Please see http://del.icio.us/lms4w/DH2007 for links to all of the papers and web sites mentioned here (links are also embedded in the post, of course).