Otherwise, anyone might know what’s on your mind.

Yesterday was the first full day of the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, the first iteration of which I’ve gotten to attend. So far the conference has been fantastic — and it promises to get even better (for me, at least) today, as my presentation was yesterday, and now I can sit back and absorb.

I’ve posted the slides from my presentation at SlideShare, though (typically) they’re pretty useless without the notes or me actually giving the presentation.

I wanted this up here in no small part because my second-to-last slide actually showed up blank during the presentation itself. At the last minute, just before the presentation began, I converted the presentation from white-on-black to black-on-white, which showed up much better on a fairly dim projector — but it turns out that I’d manually set the Cathy Davidson quote to white text, so I got to that point in the presentation and… invisible quotation.

Anyhow, here it is. This was the first time I presented this material, which comes from the last chapter of the book, and I have to say that it went extremely well. Part of how well might be seen in the Wordle cloud @jawalsh put together of yesterday’s #dh09 Twitter stream:

This may be the only time I’m bigger than Lev Manovich.

Well, I suppose that three out of six isn’t half bad:

• Finish book manuscript review for press.
• Do reading & write letter for tenure review.
• Prepare two conference presentations for next week.
• Outline fall courses and order books.
• Move office.
• Refrain from freaking out over the fact that by the time I get back from next week’s conference trip, it’s pretty much going to be July, leaving only six weeks between me and my Big Looming Deadline.

The office move was overcome by events, or rather by the failure of events to actually eventuate, to wit: the furniture for the new office, scheduled to arrive Monday, where “Monday” apparently = “sometime between Monday and Friday,” actually showed up Friday morning. Or part of it did. The rest will come in next week, while I’m gone. As will the movers themselves, as they were booked up on Friday. Which means that the move will now not be completed until after I return from next week’s conference trip, which is not doing wonders for that last bullet point, I’ll tell ya.

I’m working on the conference presentations today, however, and will continue that work on the plane. I’m pretty sure I ought to be more nervous than I am at my wild overconfidence on that front, but I can only manage so much stress at this point, and the last week just took it out of me.

The coming week of course promises to be a flurry of activity in its own right; I’m heading east early tomorrow morning to begin a week of conferencing in the DC area. The week begins with Digital Humanities 2009, hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park, followed by THATcamp 09, hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I’ll hope to post from those venues, where I’ll be talking about MediaCommons and issues related to digital scholarly publishing; if you’re there, be sure to say hello.

I have a few things that I need to accomplish:

• Finish book manuscript review for press.
• Do reading & write letter for tenure review.
• Prepare two conference presentations for next week.
• Outline fall courses and order books.
• Move office.
• Refrain from freaking out over the fact that by the time I get back from next week’s conference trip, it’s pretty much going to be July, leaving only six weeks between me and my Big Looming Deadline.

If you don’t hear from me, that would be why.

The ironies continue to pile up: five years ago today, I was moving office, out of a dank, lonely basement and into my newly renovated smallish (by the building’s standards, which are vastly out of keeping with the rest of the academic universe) but gorgeous second-floor corner office. Almost exactly three years ago, I moved across the hall, into the office formerly occupied by the Eminent Shakespearean, the office that makes every single person who walks in for the first time stop and say “Wow.” I have said for three years, and utterly without exaggeration, that I have the single best office on campus, outstripping even that of the college president.

Tomorrow morning, I begin my move out of these palatial digs, and into — well, what I’m sure will in the end be a very nice office. It’ll be spacious, certainly, and eventually the bookshelves will be up to snuff. But it’s… in the basement. Where for the next year, at least, I will be alone.

I need to acknowledge the good news in this, of which there’s a lot: for the last eleven years, I’ve been jointly appointed in English and Media Studies. Media Studies has been, all that time, an interdisciplinary program, and the half-FTE of my position was the first dedicated FTE in the program. (We got a second such position, shared with Art History, in my sixth year.) As at many other institutions, there’s a very distinct hierarchy between departments and programs here: departments get lines, space, and operating budgets, and programs, well, don’t.

But a series of developments in my program gradually made it clear that we needed to be converted to departmental status. Among those developments, the attempt to add a third joint position to the program made clear that our needs had become more disciplinary than interdisciplinary; we needed to hire someone whose graduate training was in Media Studies rather than in another discipline, and in order to do so, we needed to be able to house that line ourselves. Which meant that we had to become a department.

Which we now are: as of July 1, the Media Studies program will officially become a department, and each of the positions that was previously partly Media Studies will move fully into the new department.

The downside of this is that I’m losing my affiliation with the English department, which has been my home for the last eleven years. It’s an emotional loss, but also a material one: English is, shall we say, one of the more well-heeled departments on campus, and so I’m losing access to certain kinds of support that I’ll really miss. And I’m losing my gorgeous corner office, which is mildly heartbreaking.

On the other hand, Media Studies will finally have space: three offices, a small library, and a laptop-based computer classroom, all in the basement of the English department’s building. So as I told a colleague last week, I’m trying really hard not to think of it as moving out of a palace and into a dank, lonely basement, but instead as moving out of a rental and into a starter house. It’ll need a bit of fixing up to make it feel like home, but it’ll be all ours. And there’s something to that.

Thankfully, other folks are doing a much better job of responding to this horror than I can right now, so I’ll just direct you their way, except to say a quiet thank you for a life of extraordinary courage, and a small prayer of hope that this act of terrorism might be recognized for what it is.

[Update, 2.29 pm: Holy effing crap. This is what I'm talking about: "[Randall] Terry said he was now concerned that the Obama administration ‘will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions.’” Am I wrong in interpreting “our most effective rhetoric and actions” as acts specifically designed to terrorize?]

I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.

Soon, at least.

It’s been a heck of a week: long flight into Boston on Monday, followed by looooong cab ride out to Norwood just after midnight Tuesday morning; phenomenal symposium on the future of everything Tuesday; train back up to Boston, followed by lunch with an editor, a glass of wine with a colleague, and dinner with a former student on Wednesday; the American Literature Association (which I’d link to, but man, they really need a new website, as this one doesn’t so much load as download — literally, it’s a bunch of Word documents) starting Thursday, including my own panel yesterday, sponsored by the Digital Americanists, on the peer review of digital scholarship. And, of course, a round of dinners and such with old friends.

It’s been amazing, but I’m exhausted, and looking forward to today’s long flights home, during which I hope to get the summer started, for real. Here’s wishing all of you a lovely Memorial Day weekend, and hoping that your summers begin well, as well…

Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they hope to work with other disciplinary organizations as well.

But the key moments of her post come after that announcement, as she ponders what the basis for tenure decisions ought to be:

The basic question is not have you published that book. The fundamental question is, based on one’s first six or seven years in the profession, is one likely to be a lifelong, energetic, idea-filled, responsible, creative, innovative contributor to the profession, even when the Damocles’ Sword of tenure is no longer swinging above.

And:

How in the world can a “floor” requirement ever predict future performance? That is, if you establish a quantitative measure, such as one book for tenure, two books for full professor, what in the world are you saying about future contributions? You achieve the measure and then you stop? Really? Is that the ideology of tenure?

The point of the tenure evaluation is supposed to be using a scholar’s past performance as a predictor of continuing performance — on some level, the existence of the first book is meant to stand in for all the future books that will follow. For too many scholars, though, the book requirement becomes a literal end in itself, a finish line that, once crossed, leaves the scholar without future direction or motivation.

So what if we were to say, forget the book, or whatever number of articles one were to set, and instead focus the standards for tenure on the demonstration of an active, ongoing research agenda? How many different forms might meet these new standards? What new kinds of scholarly engagement might we foster?

I’m in the Boston area this week, speaking at a couple of conferences, the first of which is starting as I type — a meeting sponsored by AcademicCommons, a special interest group of NERCOMP (the Northeast Regional Computing Program), entitled “The Future of Everything.” We’ll be twittering at #acfoe, and posting links on delicious.

Later this week, I’ll be at the American Literature Association, hanging out with the Digital Americanists and talking about the future of peer review. Actually, that’s what I’m talking about here, too. It’ll be interesting to compare the responses…