Perhaps the best new bit of net technology I’ve seen in some time (okay, right after the iPod/iTunes/iTunes Music Store troika) has come to us today from, of all places, Amazon.com:  full-text content searching of over a hundred thousand of the books in the database.  The results give you not simply a list of the books that contain your search string within their text, but the page citation, the context of the quote, and a link to an image of the page on which the string appears.

Should I be surprised that this technology has been developed for a mass marketer of books, rather than, say, a library?

Insofar as there’s any frisson left in the f-word, it comes now:  how to resume “normal” scholarly/bloggerly discourse once that particular word (much less that particular concept) has been introduced.  An unforeseen circumstance, but an interesting one.

Yes, I recognize that I’m inviting trouble from googlers seeking something I’m not providing.  But I really needed to link to this story, and the phrase just leapt out at me as the ideal entry title.  So I’ll take my chances, and report back on the soaring traffic in a few days.

Anyhow:  via Metafilter, an article in The Guardian about the waning obscenity of the f-word.  The Guardian was of course a bit ahead of the curve (the article in question dates from November 2002), but earlier this month, our very own Amurrican FCC ruled that “fucking,” when used as an adjective or adverb and not referring explicitly to the sexual act, is permissible on television.

Punch line number one:  I always knew this administration was determined to take all the sex out of fucking.

Punch line number two:  The good news is that the best minds at MeFi are working hard to produce new, better, stronger obscenities for us all.

I’m throwing in a link here to the color picker that everybody is linking to, mostly so I don’t forget where I put it.  External memory cache, you know?

Via George comes Dictionaraoke, in which “Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary.”

“Waterloo” is sublime, but “Oops, I Did It Again” leaves me utterly without comment.

A colleague of mine, whom I haven’t seen frequently enough of late, given our mutually crazy schedules, my increasingly frequent travel, and his life with two small daughters, just stopped in the hall to ask how I was doing.

“Fine,” I told him, trying to bite back the inevitable following phrase.  He sensed it coming, though, something I could see in his face, and so I bubbled over into a complaint about the difficulties of conference-planning and the like.

He nodded both sagely and sympathetically as I whined on for a minute or two, after which, feeling a bit self-conscious, I attempted to return the favor.  “How are you?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “I want a new word.  I’m tired of asking how people are or being asked how I am and having only ‘Busy’ as a response.  As though it were a state that ever changed.”

This, of course, left me more self-conscious than ever, but made me remember that a member of the Psychology department here gave a talk a couple of years ago in which she pointed to some survey data that said that 85 percent of academics ranked themselves in the top decile for busyness.  (Interestingly, something like the same percentage also said that they were better-than-average teachers.)

So how busy am I, really?  Busier than I want to be—I haven’t gotten to read a novel that I haven’t assigned since the semester started.  I haven’t gotten to write anything except blog posts.  And I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in several weeks.

But on the other hand, I’m not so busy that I couldn’t take four days and go to Toronto, and not so busy that I couldn’t go to the gym this morning, and not so busy that I couldn’t re-watch Kissing Jessica Stein last night on cable.  I’ve clearly got time wherein I could be getting some stuff done, if I wanted to.

So how do we quantify busyness?  Is it in hours worked, tasks on the to-do list, number of times we wake up in the middle of the night thinking of things left undone?  Or is it in some other, less countable aspect, a perceived disparity between job difficulty and job rewards?  If we’re all this busy, all the time, is there any way to recalibrate the busy-meter?

One trek through downtown Toronto, one bus ride, one longish airport wait (made shorter by the higher alcohol content of Molson Canadian!), and two quite pleasant flights (see above), and I found myself back in SoCal, where it was a steamy 75 degrees at 10 pm.  Today’s high of 95 made it quite clear that I wasn’t in the Great White North anymore.  Which, my own enormous wonderful bed aside, was not altogether a good thing.

I spent most of today sorting through the developing crises surrounding weekend after next’s Media Studies conference.  All appears to be under control, but only after a full ten hours of non-stop palpitations and breathless sweating of details.

If I ever mention that I’m organizing another conference, would someone… send me a really stern e-mail, or something.

The bottom line of all this racing-heart business is, alas, that I’ve done, seen, read, thought, said, or experienced absolutely Nothing interesting enough to bother writing here today.  Either that, or I haven’t been able to sit still long enough to get interested in any of same.  Here’s hoping for more, better, soon.

ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

What follows is an extensive set of notes on this morning’s discussion, entitled “Broadening Options and Raising Standards for Qualitative Internet Research:  A Dialogue Among Scholars.” The panel was convened by Annette Markham (UIC), and included Nancy Baym (Kansas), Susan Herring (IU Bloomington), Shani Orgad (London School of Economics), and Karen Eichhorn (from a Toronto institution whose name I missed).  These notes are a bit elliptical, but hopefully they capture some of what was useful about this discussion.

Read the rest of this entry »

MISCELLANY REALLY IS THE LARGEST CATEGORY

What follows is, at best, disjointed and partial.  I’m exhausted today (witness my playing hooky), and the brain resists processing everything I’ve heard.  I have, moreover, just come from the gala dinner, where I got to chat at length with Jason, Liz, and D.  (Note to D:  That’s a really, seriously anti-climactic sentence, with the absent link on the end.  Hint, hint.)

I’m determined, however, to get this posted before bed.  Jason led off the his panel this afternoon, “Network Formations:  Producing and Consuming Online Games,” with a salute to the “back row of bloggers getting it down in real time.” Ahem.  Real time, it’s not, but here nonetheless.

Jason’s presentation focused on the question of the construction of player agency within MMORPGs such as Asheron’s Call.  Given the structured nature of these games (their most literal programming), how do games establish a sense of player agency?  This happens, according to Jason, through the game’s sense of “controlled freedom.” The game takes place in a persistent world—persistence is important—but players take an active role in shaping the world, to the extent that a cluster of players attempting to oust an evil foo from the game nearly overthrew the intents of program’s designers. 

Have players really been able to penetrate the game’s narrative through their ability to produce plugins?  “Narrative” is itself a term under challenge in game studies, posing the narratologists against the ludologists; such struggles over the term and its validity for gaming are for Jason part of the legitimation process for game studies.  In this struggle, two things are in danger of being lost—the specific history of gaming among media forms (developing out of both computer history and literature) and the interconnections between games and other media forms (how games might help us reconceptualize what narrative is, or could be).

ADVENTURES WITH ACCORDION GUY

Yesterday afternoon ended relatively early; just after my last post, the drinks began.  The highlight of the evening was being invited to join Liz and Joey (a.k.a. The Accordion Guy) on a jaunt around Accordion City.  Much of the conversation revolved around the confluences and dissonances between the world of Accordion Guy and the physical places Joey inhabits.  It’s not at all about the authenticity or honesty of Joey’s representations of Toronto, though, because those representations are infinitely emotionally honest.  The slippage is more about two other issues about contemporary representation, I think:  on the one hand, the kinds of imaginative activity that text provokes, as we create mental pictures of the characters and settings through which a blogger moves, and on the other, the ways that the places we visit always seem stand-ins for the places we already know.  It’s no accident, I think, that Joey pointed out a stretch of Queen Street that serves as the exterior setting for the club district in the US version of Queer as Folk, and the “Speaker’s Corner” set up on the edge of the Citytv building, where folks record rants that are cut together and aired on the network (the outtakes of which appear on the video monitors in a bar down the street).  The Accordion Guy’s Toronto is a multiply-mediated place, part edited rant, part television backdrop, part the figment of a reader’s imagination. (2.49 pm)

DOING MY PART TO UPHOLD THE CAPITALIST HEGEMONY

Walking home last night, I was thrilled to find a Kiehl’s on Queen Street—closed, of course, at that hour, but I cut out of the conference for a couple of hours today to zip over there and pick up a couple of things.  Kiehl’s water-based sunscreen is the only UV lotion that my face can handle, but I lost my bottle a few weeks back in one of my travels.  I’m now once again possessed of such sunscreen, but boy, did I pay the price.  It’s not just a matter of the exchange rate, or the double taxation (8% national tax; 7% state tax); apparently just getting the stuff across the lake from New York results in an enormous markup.  Seriously:  $45 US versus $78 CDN (before tax).  Yes, I’m aware that I could buy the stuff online and have it shipped to me.  And yes, I recognize the irony of wanting to spend my dollars face-to-face while attending this particular conference.  But there’s something so luscious about browsing the store, reading the labels, negotiating with the staff for samples, that I couldn’t resist.  I’m attempting to rationalize the cost as a sort of stupidity tax:  lose your sunscreen, you big dummy, and be prepared to pay up. (3.15 pm)