Oh, hi! I’m sure it appears that I’ve forgotten about this blog thing. Really, it’s less that I’ve forgotten than that my attention has gotten fragmented in a million different directions, both work-wise and internet-communication-wise. Much of the stuff that I would have blogged back in the day is getting super-condensed and landing on Twitter, and some of the link-sharing stuff that I might have done here has for the last little while wound up being shared via Google Reader. So this space has mostly served for longer thoughts, things I want to puzzle through, and there’s been precious little time for that of late.

And, of course, the introduction of Google Buzz further complicates my communication network, as Buzz allows not just the bite-size, Twitter-like thoughts to be shared, and not just links-and-comments, but also slightly longer, more discussion-oriented thoughts. There’s been a lot of criticism of the rollout of Buzz — criticism that’s so widespread I’m not going to bother tracking down links; you can, um, Google it — and much of it well-deserved, but I’ll admit that I’m enjoying it, generally speaking. It brings together several modes of communication that I already use in a way that’s useful to me, and it allows me to keep up with what a set of people I follow are reading or thinking about. And it does that without necessarily hopelessly blurring the lines among social spheres, which means — at least for right now — it’s got many of the best aspects of Facebook, but with much less noise.

Necessarily, though, is a big caveat: one of the primary criticisms of the rollout of Buzz was the way it auto-added many of your email contacts to your followers, creating the potential for all kinds of havoc, as things people expected to be private were suddenly defaulting to a more public setting than they’d intended, and as groups that people meant to kept separate were suddenly mingling. The whole thing would have gone much better if the whole follower/following thing had been made opt-in at the outset.

That said, though, it’s possible to create pretty fine-grained control of who sees what in Buzz, if you’re vigilant about your contact groups and the ways you share stuff. So taking my own advice, I spent much of this morning wading through my contacts — synchronizing my Address Book with Google Contacts, creating better groups, assigning each and every contact to the right group, and so forth. I feel so organized right now it hurts.

But here’s the reason for this post: when I got to my own Google Contact entry, I spotted an email address that I wasn’t expecting to see: basically, firstname-dot-lastname at gmail. And I was a bit surprised — I didn’t know I had that email address. In fact, I so didn’t know I had that email address that I’d actually tried a couple of times in the last couple of years to obtain that email address, only to be told that it was taken.

And it was. Apparently, by me.

When I spotted that address in my contact information, I assumed it was a mistake, but decided to check it out. I logged out of my usual gmail account, and attempted a password reset on the other one. The system asked me for my father’s middle name — and trust me, this is a real determiner; there’s no way that someone else out there with my name has a father with the same middle name. And then it took me to the password reset screen.

The account was not only actually mine, but it was apparently my first gmail account; I sent myself an invite from that account to create the one I now use. All of the sent mail in that account was from me, mostly sending out gmail invitations, and all of it was over five years old.

The inbox, however, had a backlog of 525 messages from the last five years, most of them from the last two years. Of course a bunch of it was spam that hadn’t gotten properly filtered. But a lot of it was sent by actual people who typed in an actual email address. And going through these messages was absolutely dizzying. It felt as though some little part of my internet persona had broken off from me and been living a life — or, more accurately, lives — of its own.

I apparently attended an entrepreneurial workshop at Stanford in 2009, where I used this address on several sign-in sheets, and got several followup messages. I also attended a spiritual/motivational retreat in Salt Lake City a while back, and have been deluged with mail from the organization that ran it, as well as the other folks who were at that retreat. My father (not mine; my breakaway persona’s) has invited me to keep in touch with him on LinkedIn. I went to law school and shared class notes with several of my fellow students. I am much loved by a woman who shares my last name, and emails me every single day to tell me so. And then there’s the woman who was emailing me about the arrangements for the rehearsal dinner for her wedding; she’s probably pretty pissed at me right now.

I’ve had internet doppelgangers before, folks who mistakenly think my email address is theirs, and who use it to sign up for some of the most annoying things. This felt different, however, as I’d completely forgotten the account existed, and let it go on to live several different lives without me.

The question now is whether to start using that account. It’ll take some time, I imagine, to persuade my law school colleagues, my friends from the retreat, and everyone else that I’m not who they think I am, but the address is a good one, and it would be worth doing a bit of rehab on that persona, I think.

This happened to me again last night. Same intersection, except from the opposite direction; I was turning left across traffic into the side street that leads to my neighborhood, gauging whether the gap between the vehicles was enough to get across, and completely did not see the pedestrian crossing that side street, and came within inches of hitting him. Literally: he started running in mid-cross and just made it.

I don’t want to over-justify this — had I hit him, I’d have been wholly responsible — but I’m haunted enough that I feel I need to point out a few mitigating factors. Most importantly, that intersection is seriously dark, with no corner streetlights, and no painted crosswalk. And the guy was wearing black, head-to-toe, so even if I’d been on high pedestrian alert (which admittedly I was not; this isn’t a heavily walked route, especially at night), I’m not sure I’d have been able to pick him out.

The irony is that the police department is on this very corner. So at least if I’d hit the guy, they wouldn’t have had to go far out of their way to arrest me.

Anyhow: I’ve made my confession, and I promise to be much more pedestrian-aware going through that intersection, at all hours. And pedestrian guy, if you’re out there, I’m really, really sorry for no doubt having made your life flash before your eyes.

But Claremont PD: could we maybe do something about lighting that intersection a bit better, so nobody gets inadvertently clobbered?

There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by Dave Parry’s first and second takes on the issue.) Some of this debate arose, I think, from a sense of annoyance among folks who’ve been working in DH for years that suddenly, now, with the rise of social media and the visibility of those working in and on those forms, a bunch of attention is being paid to something called “digital humanities” — but the thing going by that name isn’t quite the same thing that it’s been for the past few decades, and the thing that DH has been is now being overlooked (or worse, dismissed) in favor of this new interest in digital media.

As someone who works in digital media, but feels a profound connection to the idea that I have of the digital humanities, I’ve found myself a little puzzled at moments, both by the debate and by the emotion behind it. I’ve intermittently had that sense of realizing, mid-argument, that you and the person with whom you’re arguing are using exactly the same words but are nonetheless speaking two different languages. And as Matt Kirschenbaum noted — correctly, I think — the fact that these battles over the definition of such terms are based in stereotypes indicates that they’re nearly always, and certainly in this case, institutional turf wars.

This is not at all to say that such battles don’t matter — in fact, for those embroiled in them, institutional turf wars often matter enormously. But what I’ve spent the last few days pondering is why — what the real stakes of such wars of definition are, and whether there’s a better way of thinking about the questions of institutional structure that underwrite them. The result is an awfully long and somewhat rambly blog post, safely tucked below the fold, in which I work through my thoughts on these questions.
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This morning, awfully bright and awfully early, I participated in a fantastic roundtable on the legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was quite well-attended, given the early hour and that it was the last day of the conference, and which produced some really fascinating presentations. I’d promised my friends at wallace-l that I’d post my thoughts about the panel to the list afterward, and having done that, I’d like to post them here as well.

I thought the panel was excellent, overall; it was wonderful to get to meet all of the speakers, and to hear the quite tight connections across the various presentations. Lee Konstantinou, who proposed the roundtable, did an excellent job of putting it together, and Stephen Burn, who introduced and moderated it, did an excellent job of setting the tone for us. The only downside was that with eight presenters (and that presenter tendency to go just a minute or so longer than we’re supposed to) there was very little time for discussion, and we wound up getting kicked out of the room just as the Q&A got going.

Anyhow, here are some very brief notes on the presentations, which I took as I listened. Anybody who was there should fill in the inevitable holes — and everybody should forgive me if I’ve mischaracterized anyone’s presentation.

Stephen Burn presented a very close reading of “A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life,” demonstrating Wallace’s attention to poetics at the micro-level, which works in concert with the more macro-level concerns we often pay attention to in Infinite Jest.

Marshall Boswell presented a rich intertextual reading of Wallace and Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, via their approaches to Wittgenstein’s argument about the impossibility of a private language and the role of language in creating connections between people.

Samuel Cohen discussed the absence of closure in Wallace’s narrative structures (and Infinite Jest in particular) as an implicit argument about history’s non-overness, contra Fukuyama and other such arguments about the end of the Cold War.

John Conley returned us to the apparently simple question of what Infinite Jest is about — what its object is — in order to get us to think about addiction as symptom in the Freudian sense (i.e., not the cause but the evidence of an underlying problem), finally arguing that in its treatment of addiction and the potential for recovery, Infinite Jest becomes a better critique of cynicism than in “E Unibus Pluram.”

I started out talking about my earlier argument, in The Anxiety of Obsolescence, about Wallace’s treatment of mediation in Infinite Jest and “E Unibus Pluram” — television as a symptom of our sense of loneliness and frustrated quest for human connection — before turning to Infinite Summer and the ways that the movement of literary texts through online social networks present the potential that Wallace sought for the novel, and then some — not just making the reader “feel less alone inside” but helping her be less alone in the world. (I’ll likely post a longer version of my own comments sometime later; I’m thinking I’d like to expand them into a brief article.)

Mary Holland discussed Wallace’s work in the context of the unnamed thing that follows postmodernism; reading “Octet” with and against the metafictional techniques of “Lost in the Funhouse” and particularly focusing on the author/narrator’s direct quizzing of the reader.

Lee Konstantinou focused on Wallace’s relationship to the avant-garde, beginning with the horrified responses to the question of whether Wallace’s suicide can be read as a literary gesture, moving through a reading if the suicides and despair represented throughout his writing, understood as a post-ironic version of the avant-garde’s attempt to create union between life and art.

And finally, Michael Pietsch discussed The Pale King; I madly took notes, but they’re a little disjointed. Pietsch says Wallace had been working on since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including “Glitterer,” “SJF” (which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and “What is Peoria For?” As we’ve heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, and so forth. What I hadn’t heard before today was that various pieces we’ve seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapters of the novel, including “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” and “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity. The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we’ve heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn’t there to argue with.

That’s pretty much the report from the panel; I’m only sorry the discussion couldn’t continue, and that I had to run to a meeting right after…

I’ve been busy tweeting up a storm at the MLA this year (or what amounts to a storm for me, anyhow), but haven’t been compelled to write a full blog post as yet — a situation that got called out when a pal of mine here suggested that this blog had turned into alternating posts reading “I’m on the road on the way to X” and “sorry for not posting; I’ve been really busy.”

Which is to say: sorry for not posting; first I was on the road on the way to the MLA, and it’s been really busy since I’ve been here.

But as I’ve got approximately 15 minutes of downtime before my next meeting, I thought I’d use the time to say, despite the undeniable gloom here this year, I’ve had a really extraordinary conference: a full day of brilliant panels yesterday, two great “tweetups” (I know) with my MLA-attending Twitter pals, and a bunch of great meetings today.

The most exciting of those meetings was with Bonnie Wheeler, president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, who has, it turns out, not only been reading Planned Obsolescence but has also been talking about it in really exciting ways. We talked at length about the ways that the issues I discuss in scholarly book publishing are also affecting scholarly journals, and the ways that she and other editors are attempting to face them — thinking through the future of peer review, the future of publishing infrastructures, the future of intellectual property, and so forth. She mentioned that she’s working on an article for the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, which I very much look forward to seeing.

The panel I put together for the Discussion Group on Media and Literature, entitled “Media Studies and the Digital Scholarly Present,” also went fabulously, with four great papers by Chuck Tryon, Dave Parry, Tanya Clement, and Jeremy Douglass. We’ve posted lots of stuff from the panel at MediaCommons, and I hope that the discussions started there will continue.

I’ve also heard a bunch of amazing papers, including in particular Meredith McGill’s “What’s the Matter with the History of the Book?”, in which she lamented book history’s turn toward a sole focus on the material aspects of the text and away from any kind of textual analysis or interpretation, in the end suggesting that media studies (and digital media studies in particular) might provide an opportunity for book history to re-integrate textual with material analysis.

It’s clear to me that the story of #MLA09 is the digital humanities; all the DH panels were overflowing, and the presentations and conversations were energized and filled with possibility, at a moment when the future of the profession as we’ve known it seems very much in doubt.

But that’s just the thing: most of the digital humanists I know are committed to changing the profession, to making it something we haven’t yet known — and just as the need for change is becoming inescapably clear, the possibilities for such change are beginning to seem very real.

You know how sometimes you’re trying to think of a name or a word and it just won’t come, no matter how hard you try, but later that day while you’re chopping onions or taking a shower you’re all suddenly “Judi Dench! Dude, it was Judi Dench!” out of nowhere? So sometimes when you’re trying to remember a name or word that won’t come, you stop trying, hoping to get it to bubble up sooner precisely by not thinking about it?

About six months ago (maybe more), I was having a conversation with someone (can’t at all remember who) about those words that you’ve either only seen in print and never heard pronounced or that you’ve actually heard pronounced but for whatever reason haven’t connected the version you hear to the version you read, and so run around with some completely wrong assumed pronunciation for the word until, at a moment of supreme embarrassment, somebody finally corrects you. And I had the most brilliant example of this, the story of a friend who for whatever reason didn’t connect the printed version of a very common word to its very common pronunciation, and instead invented an entire etymology for the pronunciation he’d imagined for it.

But I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember the word, which kinda deflated the story a bit.

I knew it was a pretty short verb, and a really common one, and I knew the misunderstanding revolved around it being an irregular past participle, for which he invented an entirely imagined regular infinitive form. But beyond that, I couldn’t get the word to pop up, so I stopped thinking about it.

And apparently really stopped thinking about it, both consciously and unconsciously, because only this morning, months and months later, as I was typing a message that happened to contain the word, did the memory of having tried to remember that word return.

This entire blog post is brought to you by my desire to make sure that I don’t forget once again that the word was “misled.” (Pronounced MAI-zld, pp of “to misle.”)

One of the most exciting parts of Planned Obsolescence for me has of course been the open review process we’ve been conducting at MediaCommons; it’s been fantastic getting speedy, focused feedback from scholars already invested in new digital modes of communication. And NYU Press has been extremely supportive of my desire to test out that review process, to see how it might affect the ways I revise, and the ways the project is received.

But of course the press has some understandable questions about that open process; will the scholars who participate in it be willing to take the same critical risks that more traditional, blind reviewers take in approaching the project? Will they be able to create the same kinds of thoughtful, synthetic response that traditional reviews provide? Will they be better at responding to certain kinds of details than at probing the broader logic of the argument as a whole?

In part as a result of these questions, the press sent the manuscript out to two readers for traditional peer review, first sending them the book proposal and sample chapters prior to extending me an advance contract, and then sending them the completed manuscript at more or less the same time it went up online. Those external reviews are now in, and they’re great, carefully reading and responding to the manuscript as a whole, and pointing the way for some of the revision I’ll be doing in the coming weeks.

The press’s editor-in-chief, Eric Zinner, had a fantastic further idea, though; what if we could get the external reviewers into dialogue with the open reviewers? He asked the reviewers if they’d be willing to participate in our online process, and happily, one of them agreed; Lisa Spiro’s preliminary and second-round reviews are now up alongside the manuscript, available for reader discussion.

Lisa, for those of you who may not know her, is the ideal reviewer for this manuscript; as director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library, author of the blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and developer of the Digital Research Tools wiki, she’s been at the forefront of research and practice in new modes of scholarly communication for some time. I’m thrilled to have her response to the manuscript, which is extremely thoughtful and thorough, and even happier to have her agree to engage with the project’s online reviewers.

Many thanks to Lisa and Eric for making this possible, and to the many readers and commenters at Planned Obsolescence for making the project so exciting thus far.

Over the course of the last year I’ve been very excitedly following the developments at the University of Michigan Press, as the press became an academic unit housed within the library, and then developed a very forward-looking collaborative strategy called MPublishing, bringing together the strengths of the press and the library’s digital publishing services group.

I’ve been paying close attention to these developments not just because of their implications for Planned Obsolescence, but also because I’m a member of the advisory board for a new series being planned by the press focusing on groundbreaking work in digital humanities. Now, UM and HASTAC have jointly announced a new publication prize associated with the series.

I’m thrilled to be involved in this project, and look forward to seeing the work that it fosters.

I’ve just gotten the following email message from my friends at Time Warner Cable:

We’ve got a hard choice…

Roll Over or Get Tough?

No one likes paying more. You don’t. We don’t.

Yet, every time our contracts with TV program providers come up for renewal, that’s what we face.

Price increases. Big ones. Up to 300% more.

Sometimes we can avoid passing them on to you. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes, a network will threaten to take your shows away if we don’t roll over.

Whenever that’s happened in the past, we’d make the best deal we could and hope that would be the end of it. But it never was. So no more.

The networks shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat on what you watch and how much you pay. You’re our customers, so help us decide what to do.

Let us know if you want us to Roll Over or Get Tough.

We’re just one company, but there are millions of you.

Together, we just might be able to make a difference in what America pays for its favorite entertainment.

So, in effect, you’re using the power of crowdsourcing to find out whether your customers would prefer to pay the same amount for less entertainment, or to pay more for the same amount. By intimating that we all need to form a united front to stick it to the network Man.

One might also consider that the same united front could conceivably used to tell one’s cable provider where they can stick not only their bogus referendum but also their ridiculously overpriced service.

We may be your customers, but if you think you’re in the driver’s seat on what we watch and how much we pay, you might consider that piece of mail I got last week telling me that Fios is coming to my neighborhood.

Is all I’m saying.

So up inbetween the droning “ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod” of the last couple of weeks of the semester, I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff going on. First, I’ve gotten the outside reviews (old-school style) of Planned Obsolescence, and I’m really fired up about them, and looking forward to getting into the revision process. (Plus there’s a bit of other excitement about the reviews, which I’ll be sharing soon.) And it looks like I’m starting to line up some talks in the spring that will bring parts of the book to a series of audiences I’m really hoping to reach: library folks, small college IT leaders, and so forth.

In the meantime, though, there’s this semester to finish, and that article that’s got to be gotten out — oh, right. Today.

More on all this soon.