Recently in the Humanities Category

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities:

I've had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal should be to provide access to more material. True, but converting books into a textual format makes them much more accessible, allowing users to search, manipulate, organize, and analyze them. Here's my summary of what you can do with an electronic text. Most of these advantages are pretty obvious, but worth articulating.

It's not digital text if it's an image file. It's just an image, that might contain anything at all. Vannevar Bush's Memex was an idea for a text storage-and-retrieval system that worked by storing and linking microfilm images of pages of text, but his vision was purely analog. Page images do provide a certain amount of information, and today it's not too hard to find tools that convert page images to text, but an archival project is incomplete if the digitization process stops at simply supplying images of the the material to be archived.

Boston Globe:

Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

The study of literature is worth doing - and worth doing well. No one should be content to watch it fading gently into that good night.

I'm not the first to argue for a closer engagement of literary studies with science. For instance, in his famous 1959 essay on "The Two Cultures," the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow lamented the scientific ignorance of "literary intellectuals," identifying it as a main reason for the yawning divide between the cultures of literature and science.

But I would go beyond Snow's suggestion that literary scholars should know more about science. Literary scholars should actually do science. --Jonathan Gottschall

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities:
The timing is right... I think I'm going to be able to attend this. Woo hoo!

According to Metafilter, "Nothing signals the death of a trend like an article in the NY Times Style section."

Even his clothing -- an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman's waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery -- is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early '90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, "steampunk" is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. "To me, it's essentially the intersection of technology and romance," said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

My ten-year-old has wanted to be a scientist since he was four, but he's bored by math. Paul Lockhart (PDF) helps me understand why. But what do I do now?

The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. Everyone understands that poets, painters, and musicians create works of art, and are expressing themselves in word, image, and sound. In fact, our society is rather generous when it comes to creative expression; architects, chefs, and even television directors are considered to be working artists. So why not mathematicians?

Part of the problem is that nobody has the faintest idea what it is that mathematicians do. The common perception seems to be that mathematicians are somehow connected with science-- perhaps they help the scientists with their formulas, or feed big numbers into computers for some reason or other. There is no question that if the world had to be divided into the "poetic dreamers" and the "rational thinkers" most people would place mathematicians in the latter category.

Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

My Intro to Literary Study students read Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves while I was away at a conference for most of last week. They really seem to enjoy this book. Early on this term, I noticed a critical mass of students who try to make their blog a place to practice writing for a real audience, rather than simply a place to "do their homework."  I'm also seeing a lot of deliberately playful use of language, dancing around and sometimes pushing beyond the boundaries of academic writing.

I can't even believe how interesting a book on punctuation can be. I'm learning - AND HAVING FUN TOO! Look at that, I'm having so much fun that I caps-locked. --Jessie

Alright here it goes... I, STEPAHNIE MARIE WYTOVICH, ADMIT TO LIKING THIS BOOK. Gah.  Ok I guess I feel a little better now.  -- Stephanie

I won't deny it, I'm afraid of the exclamation mark.  I have been going to therapy and I've made improvements, but I'm still a little!-phobic.  Exclamation marks are so strong! -- Erica

I have to say I like ellipsis because, the other reason they are used is to trail off in an intriguing manner.... -- Tiffany

I use italics way too much. -- Lauren

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It's the kind of place where someone can say, "That reminds me of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric... inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio, and... uh.. .what's the other one?"  and it's likely that the others will get the joke.

While walking around the city after the conference was over, I had a vision of a future 4Cs conference that made me giddy. I'll tell you about it in a little bit. First, let me talk about the conference.

New to me... disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum.

In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either "G*d" or "G-d" for those whose religious beliefs preclude writing God in full), or as a technique by forum moderators to censor unwanted posting, such as spam, internet trolling or political opinions.^[1] The net effect of disemvoweling text is to render it illegible or legible only through significant cognitive effort, thus suppressing unwanted comments and discouraging such comments from being made in future.

From Orwell's 1984, which I'm teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein.

By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient.  The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.   Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.  Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.  The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.  With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.  Every citizen, or least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.  The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, notice did for the first time.

I find this passage intriguing, in part because the printing press is usually seen as a tool that created an intellectual tradition (by fulfilling and extending an economic and social demand for the mass production of accurate, authoritative texts) rather than the first step in a process by which the control of the means of production shapes the thoughts of the consumers.  This passage points out the invention of the two-way telescreen as the tipping point, because in this vision the means for broadcasting over telescreens is not distributed to the masses. Even in his office, Winston Smith does not communicate by telephone, only via paper orders sent through peneumatic tubes.

If we have time, I'll introduce the students to a little bit of Michel Foucault.

Play This Thing offers this review of "Photopia" (a text game by Adam Cadre).

Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It's barely interactive at all.

And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It's difficult to explain why that is without ruining the game. The key to Photopia's success is the interactions between the player and the main character (who, interestingly enough, is never actually playable).

Photopia takes the term "interactive fiction" to a new level, because that's really what it is.

Photopia actually brought IF to that new level almost 10 years ago, back in 1998, so this isn't exactly news -- but the game is still worth the praise today.

The Times Online has a story about children's non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age 22. Nevertheless, I regularly remind my students to be careful of what they publish (and, sadly, what your friends publish).

"When young people put up their personal profiles they are not thinking about job or university applications. Typically, they are simply talking to their mates. Employers or admissions tutors who delve into these places are being highly and inappropriately intrusive. It's a bit like looking at someone's diary," Mr Carr told The Times.

"A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms."

The children's charities are seeking clarification on whether discrimination legislation could be used to stop companies from using social networking sites for recruitment purposes.

Mike Edwards describes his first time teaching Bartleby the Scrivener:

I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who'd used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I'd asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead discussion in class today, and to come to class with notes on motivation and action in the story to help them do so.

I brought my laptop to class, which I'd never done before. (Each classroom has its own dedicated computer.) I set it up on my desk. In the seconds before class started, I said to them something like this: "You've just read a story in which someone, with a screen between him and the other characters, fails to do what they expect of him, and in violating the expectations customary to their relationship, causes disruption and concern."

And that was All. I. Said.

Carolyn, my five-year-old, wept in the middle of "Owly 2: Just a Little Blue."  The Owly books use no words, just icons and facial expressions to tell some very complex stories. Carolyn likes stories about adventure and friendship, and she's a visual learner. Once I helped her interpret the first few speech bubble icons, she was able to "read" the story to me quite easily. Bedtime is always a struggle for her, and I don't think she was really prepared for the emotional intensity of the story. The story ends on a happy note, but the next day she was still distressed enough that she had to tell mommy about the sad parts.

There's no death or betrayal, just a misunderstanding, but the long wordless sequence where Owly seems to give up his hopes communicates disappointment and sadness so clearly that I think my daughter was caught off-guard.  The book is absolutely delightful, but you should know your child -- the artwork really drives the emotion home. 

Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words.

In any case, ! ? * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I have no idea about why = is out of the game.]

I've been playing Rogue, so I want to translate that as "potion, scroll, gold, Rogue, corridor, stairway..."

Scotsman:

"I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn't have fired. Not at him." -- 88-year-old Luftwaffe veteran Horst Rippert, speaking of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator and author of The Little Prince.

Guardian

If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and talent of Plath's.

I regularly introduce poetry to freshman English majors. Some who write angsty poetry as a form of literary self-therapy are surprised to learn that there's a difference between the "I" who speaks in the poem (through a fictional character), and the identity of the poet who created the fictional character in order to achieve some artistic effect in the mind of the reader (rather than to achieve a verbal exorcism of personal demons).

The Tribune Review published this story about an incident at my local library.

The director of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library was injured Wednesday afternoon while blocking a married couple who allegedly tried to steal a Christmas novel.

[...]

Muccari said he was near the entrance for the 4:22 p.m. incident because he was posting tax forms on a bulletin board by the metal detector when the alarm went off as Jennifer Cook walked through.

He determined that a book in her bag was her own, but discovered that she was concealing a copy of "Finding Noel" in the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.

"She said, 'I wasn't trying to steal it,' and I said, 'Oh really?' " Muccari said.

When Muccari asked a clerk to call police, Jennifer Cook offered up the book, said she had to be someplace and asked him to cancel the police call, Muccari said.

Although David Cook initially claimed not to know about the attempted theft, he pushed Muccari as the couple tried to flee, police Capt. George Seranko said.

Police were able to identify the Cooks because the man left behind his wallet and the woman left behind a broken, silver necklace with a charm bearing the name "Jennifer." Police have been unable to locate the couple.

I love the details the reporter puts into the story, such as the quote from the judge who married the Cooks.  I looked up the opening of "Finding Noel" on Amazon, and found this:

When I was a boy, my mother told me that everyone comes into our lives for a reason. I'm not sure I believe that's true. The thought of God weaving millions of lives together into a grand human tapestry seems a bit fatalistic to me. Still, as I look back at my life, there seem to be times when such divinity is apparent.... Of course such a theory carried to the extreme would mean that God sabotaged my car that night because, had my car's timing belt not broken at that precise moment, this story never would have happened. But it did, and my life was forever changed. Perhaps my mother was right. If God can align the planets, maybe He can do the same for our lives.

Maybe the Cooks should have thought about that before their little encounter with Muccari.

From the introduction to a great list of common errors in English (Paul Brians).

The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I'll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we're concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

Some examples that make my skin crawl: being that, based around/based off of, and bias/biased.

Lindsay Waters, Inside Higher Ed:

[T]he first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes -- and here I'm going global -- a good curry. It really sets you back. Or maybe forward. Style, maniera, modo is what we readers demand. The humanists of the Renaissance knew the Romans had the ability to put sentences that had concinnitas, but that their ancestors in what we call the Middle Ages had lost that ability. When the Ancients constructed the Arch of Constantine, it stayed together for centuries, even though neglected. Concinnity -- what a splendid word!

It seems to me that when bad styling of sentences became accepted, we got used to it. We compensated for the lack of quality and impact of the sentences that people wrote as evidence of their scholarly abilities by asking them for more of them in the hopes we could get the same buzz going that we used to get from fewer sentences. Last year I ran a panel at the Modern Language Association on "Slow Reading," and today I'm advocating slow writing. Editors are in the position to make this change take place.

H.H. Munro (SAKI)  Esme

"The hyena hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression. The hounds looked more than ever embarrassed as their quarry paraded its sudden intimacy with us, and the faint toot of a horn in the distance was seized on as a welcome signal for unobtrusive departure. Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the gathering twilight."

From the Short Story of the Day.

Grand Text Auto introduced me to the excellent indie mini-game Passage.  Play it. It takes a few minutes to download and about 5 minutes to play. I'm misty-eyed.

Play it!

ABC News:

In the comic, Dilbert asks, "Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?"

"I wanted to try to boost the morale for the employees," Steward said.

His bosses, however, didn't find the joke so funny. They didn't like the implication that they were the drunken lemurs in this scenario.

Using surveillance video, his bosses identified Steward as the comic culprit and fired him.

I'm posting this as another example in a long line of posts that I hope will encourage my students to be careful about what they write about on their blogs and personal profile pages.

I don't think that publishing a cartoon is a terminal offense.  I don't want to fail a student for showing passion or voicing an opinion, since I'm trained to see even a negative outburst as a "teachable moment" that can benefit the whole class (and my own superiors feel I am doing my job when I try to salvage a difficult situation with a frustrated student, rather than isolating and ejecting every student who causes friction).  I don't know anything else about Steward's situation.  Perhaps this comic was just one volley in an ongoing toxic battle that was affecting productivity.  But, more likely, his action angered powerful people who aren't used to being challenged.

But regardless of what I personally think, the truth is that employers have the legal right to hold you to whatever contract you signed when they hired you.

Politico:

Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters.

On the call, Wolfson said: "Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he's breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn't his own."

"When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader," said Wolfson.

Obama closely echoed a passage from a speech that Deval Patrick, now the Massachusetts governor, used at a campaign rally when he was running for that office in 2006.

American Literature.com

The Short Story of the Day features works by Anton Chekhov, Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, H.H. Munro (SAKI), Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. An archive of all the stories featured to date can be found here.

From The Boston Globe:=

College administrators say that intense pressure to gain acceptance to selective schools has compelled parents to turn to high-priced essay editors and coaches. "The euphemism we use is polished," said Parke Muth, an admissions dean at the University of Virginia. "If you're paying someone that much money, there shouldn't be fingerprints. But some essays have that sheen, that lemony-fresh smell that makes you wonder." Outright plagiarism usually sticks out like a sore thumb, and suspicions can often be confirmed with a Google search. But detecting the helpful hand of a parent, guidance counselor, or writing coach, even for admissions officers who have read thousands of personal essays, takes a keen eye.

NPR's In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman).

"I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men -- men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking," Dennehy says. "And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth."

I rotated this play off of my syllabus this year. I'm sure I'll bring it back.

Christian Science Monitor:

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading "Nickel and Dimed," in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

Ehrenreich's book was Seton Hill's summer reading selection, so I'm teaching the book later this term. And I'm particularly interested in this item. Shepard's youth and strength (and probably gender) gave him access to a moving job that the middle-aged Ehrenreich wouldn't likely have landed.

Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What's yours? (Via)

THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn't. It's been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn't tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I'm just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to be professional writers.

Every writer follows her own path within the publishing industry, which makes for entertaining and inspiring stories off the page. Paths to Publication offers some of those unique perspectives. I hope it also gives us all comfort knowing that our journey as writers is not just the breaks we get, but also the opportunities we take.

Frighteningly sad story from a San Diego TV station.

For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher's assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.

"What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn't the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher's assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin," said Corcoran.

In retrospect, Corcoran said, his deceit took him a long time to accept.

"As a teacher it really made me sick to think that I was a teacher who couldn't read. It is embarrassing for me, and it's embarrassing for this nation and it's embarrassing for schools that we're failing to teach our children how to read, write and spell!"