Folks I’d met before, whom I was happy to see again:

– Chuck;
– John;
– Scott;
– Dr. B;
– Laura.

A non-exhaustive list of folks I hadn’t met before, whose acquaintance I was very happy to make:

– Jonathan;
– Clancy;
– a white bear;
– Amanda;
– Collin.

Another non-exhaustive list of folks I never got to meet, and wish I had:

– Amardeep and the other guys down at that end of the table.

Quality of conversation: genial, fast-paced, multi-threaded.

Number of glasses of wine consumed over what really ought to have been my limit: 1.

Number of phrases used by grad-school colleagues that I discovered weren’t, in fact, in popular circulation, and thus required some lightly embarrassed explanation: 1.

Number of minutes before the first panel I need to attend, at the time when I actually wrote this post: 23.

Number of minutes remaining once I actually got this posted: 4.

Level of frustration with internet connection that keeps crapping out on me: high.

Number of hours of sleep last night that too much wine and too much to think about resulted in: 3.

Time and place of my next expected proper night’s sleep: Saturday, Paris.

Today was a heck of a day at the MLA. I actually experienced the conference, and the way it was meant to be experienced, I think.

In part, I mean having had a full night’s sleep, which was blissful and amazing, and which I hope to repeat immediately after this post. In part, though, I mean that I attended two great panels, ran into some old friends, met and talked with some new folks, and generally enjoyed the entire thing.

I started early today, at the 8.30 am panel “Everquesting: Digital Learning and the Humanities,” and while I was waiting for it to begin, I immediately ran into Scott and Matt. The papers, by an all-star cast of Anne Balsamo, Cathy Davidson, Anna Everett, and Douglas Thomas, were all quite interesting, though the timing was quite off somehow, and by the time Thomas got up to give his paper, six minutes were left in the session. The result was that Thomas barely even got to launch into his presentation before the entire thing was stopped, and there was no discussion at all. Which was a shame, as several ideas came up that I’d have liked to hear more about.

Anne Balsamo’s paper was a very sci-fi oriented projection of a future higher education scenario deriving from contemporary virtual presence and gaming technologies; part of her point was to unpack the ways that the students of the future will far outpace contemporary faculty (in their fluid uses of network technologies for gathering knowledge), but also the ways in which they still need educating (in critical thinking and creative synthesis; in being convinced that knowledge is not simply out there to be “found,” and is inseparable from the act of thinking). One of the most compelling bits of her talk, for me, was the last item in her closing manifesto for the future education of what she, after Pat Cadigan, called “original synners”: that academics must cease their quest to educate students-as-replicants and instead start thinking about education students-as-mutants. Higher education has for the last two hundred years largely—though by no means exclusively—been focused on self-replication, on a constancy of values in knowledge production, and it simply must think more fluidly about the new technologies through which knowledge is actually produced today, and how future generations are going to need to morph to meet the demands of those technologies.

Cathy Davidson, furthering this point, mentioned her frustrations with the rhetoric of crisis that has seemed to engulf the humanities, as the traditional disciplines have been faced with contemporary technological change, saying that, given the issues that are at stake in our encounters with new technologies, “if we cannot find ways to take on leadership in the digital realm, then we in the humanities deserve our crisis.” Indeed.

At noon, I attended Matt and Kari‘s panel on Material Textualities, which was fascinating, not least for the ways that (as Matt pointed out at the beginning of his talk) the MLA’s reliance on alphbetical organization of panelists resulted in a reverse progression of papers from the digital (Matt) through the image (Kari), and back to early print (Peter Stallybrass), which created some great backward-resonances of a sort that isn’t usual in these settings.

Inbetween these panels, I cruised the book exhibit, which I’ve inevitably found to be the place for the chance encounter with the person I didn’t expect to see. And indeed, I ran into two old pals in quick succession, neither of whom had I planned on seeing, but each of whom was great to catch up with. After the panels, I had a short breather, and then spent some time with a former colleague, before heading off to the blogger meetup.

About which more at a later point. For now, there’s crashing—another full day ahead tomorrow.

It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shuttle bus, the second plane, the “air train,” the real train, and the cab, I checked into my hotel room, put my stuff down, checked my email, and got a phone call from a former student who’s here interviewing. I wanted a drink and something to eat before bed, and so went down to meet him in the lobby bar.

At some point during our conversation, I did the math, and figured out that as I’d awoken at 3.30 am in Prague, that meant that I’d gotten up at 9.30 pm the night before, local time-wise. And I was clearly not at my sharpest, because while I had a fantastic time over what turned out to be two drinks with the former student, I somehow forgot to eat, and hadn’t eaten anything since the second plane. But, I figured, I’m so tired now that I don’t even feel like eating.

Not the best decision, I don’t think. I went up to my room, completely crashed, and woke up three hours later, ravenous and unable to go back to sleep. I drank a bunch of water, read a bit, turned the light back out, turned the light back on, read a bit more, made another assay on sleep, and then finally just gave up and sat at the computer, hoping to get some work done.

And, in fact, I did! But I did it the very, very hard way. My intent was to use yesterday morning to record the audio track for a video presentation of one of the talks I’ve given this fall. I’d planned on using ProfCast, which records both your audio and the content and transitions between your slides as you play them. The problem is, however, that I need to see the notes from my slides in order to record the audio, and thus I need either to print out the paper and read from that, or I need to be hooked up to an external monitor so that Keynote will default to the “rehearsal” view on my own screen. And as I am without printer or external monitor, that wasn’t going to work. So I recorded the audio track in Audacity, imported it into iMovie, exported my slides to jpeg, imported them into iMovie, stretched them out to meet the appropriate transitions in the talk, et voilà!

Except. When I compress in iMovie 5, the sync between audio and video slips. The more compression, the more slippage. So a “reasonably sized” (i.e., only ridiculously large 10MB) .mov file plays fine for the first couple of minutes, but then the slides start refusing to change, even as the audio marches ruthlessly on. I’ve exported a “full quality” (i.e., 87 MB) .mp4 file, which is perfect. Now I just have to (a) figure out how to compress it enough to have any hope of a reasonable web distribution for it, or (b) find a way to print my paper and do the stupid thing over again in ProfCast.

In any case, that little morning adventure, pleasant though it was, apparently took every bit of energy I had for the day. I’d room-serviced a huge breakfast, and so thought that despite jet lag and lack of sleep I’d be fine. I met my friend Cyrus for lunch, though, and about halfway through, it suddenly became really, super evident that I was Not Fine. I somewhat hastily excused myself, went back to my room, and spent the next three hours attempting fruitlessly to take a nap. (Can someone explain that to me? How is it that you can get yourself to the point of nervous collapse from exhaustion and then find yourself unable to fall asleep?)

Finally, after a room-serviced hamburger, I took one of my big-gun sleeping pills, and completely crashed. Slept through until 6 am. Which I think is the first full night’s sleep I’ve gotten since leaving California.

And thus ends my first day at the MLA!

Today promises to be more conferency, all the way around. My schedule:

8.30 – 9.45 am:
Everquesting: Digital Learning and the Humanities
Liberty Ballroom Salon C, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke University
–Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
–Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University
–Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara
–Douglas Thomas, University of Southern California

12.00 noon – 1.15 pm:
Textual Materialities
Grand Ballroom Salon I, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Save As: Textual Studies and the Challenges of Born-Digital Literature,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Picture Criticism: Textual Studies and the Image,” Kari M. Kraus, University of Rochester
–“Textual Studies and the Book,” Peter Bigland Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

1.30 pm: lunch with editor and co-editor.

3 pm: coffee with scholar I’m very excited about meeting!

7ish pm: drink with former colleague.

8.45 pm: blogger meetup. Assuming I can stay awake that late.

I’ll hope to see some of you there!

I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose—my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wondering if I were going to fall asleep and miss the alarm. R. walked me downstairs around 5.15, and I got on the shuttle to the airport. He’s staying on in Prague until the 30th; I, on the other hand, am going to the MLA.
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Amusingly enough, my very last post of 2005 was about the difficulities of beginning a new large-scale project. That project, which I planned on spending my sabbatical with during spring 2006, got somewhat overcome by events, primarily the take-off of planning for MediaCommons. That project, called Archive, is one I hope to return to at some point, but it’s wound up getting even further back-burnered over the course of the year, as I realized that the conference paper I’d written about blogging was in the process of morphing into an article, and that it was threatening the boundaries of article space as well, turning into a full-length project, whether I wanted it to or not.

As it turns out, I’m excited about the blogging project, which I’m thinking of as something book-like but not book-ish, something that will almost certainly live in MediaCommons. But figuring out how to get from the article to the full-scale thing is proving, once again, daunting. Where do I begin?

Last year, Francois asked whether a technical solution might not do the trick, helping me to, as he said, “keep in focus a configuration of an unfolding.” This year, thanks to my friend G., I’ve found such a tool, one that I’m still experimenting with, but that I think might do the trick: Scrivener. The software is still in beta right now, but it’s got some awfully great features designed to help take a writer—of any kind—from a fuzzy notion of some too-complex-to-imagine text to a draft. It produces outline views, corkboard-and-index-card views, draft document views; it can contain research notes and objects alongside but separate from the draft-in-process; it allows for some complex uses of metadata.

I’m in the very early stages of imagining the full project, and I’m quite sure that I’m dead wrong about some key aspect of it as yet, but I think the malleability of Scrivener’s uses of text will allow me the simultaneous flexibility and structure that I need in getting started. Which, I hope, will make the getting started less daunting.

I’m now completely convinced that this place really is the capital of Christmaslandia. And I mean that in a good way. All week, we’ve wandered out in the evenings to see the families and the friends enjoying the Christmas market, with its festival foods and its hot wine and its small local performances.

Last night, Christmas Eve, we went to our favorite local restaurant for a fabulous dinner, and then sat in a bar and drank a couple of beers, waiting for what was for us, the main event: a performance in the square by singers from the Czech national opera. The music was all unfamiliar, both to me and to R., who knows way more about classical music than I ever will. Parts of it sounded German, and parts of it sounded Russian, which makes me think that it may have been Czech all the way around (and given that the only Czech composer whose work I know is Smetana, it could well have been). It was absolutely gorgeous, though; a chorus of about 24, with four soloists, and an orchestra of maybe a dozen pieces, performing under non-ideal circumstances (outdoors, under a canopy, in something like 30 degree weather, with heat lamps, uneven mic-ing, and a pretty tinny amplification system), but through all of that, just beautiful.

After the performance ended, and bows were taken, the ensemble launched into one last song, which I can only assume was a very familiar Christmas carol. The orchestra played the opening bars, and as the conductor raised her arms to bring in the chorus, she turned to the assembled audience in the square, and brought them in as well. And several hundred people sang along.

At that moment, more than any I’ve had since I’ve been here, I really, really wished I understood Czech.

This is what I want from Christmas from now on: no malls, no sales, no holiday specials on television, no forced gatherings, no ridiculous overflow of presents. No pressure. Just being exactly where you want to be, with exactly whom you want to be, hearing the music and knowing that everyone around you is having, collectively, their own variant of the same private experience.

Merry Christmas to all of you who are celebrating it today. May your experience of the day be as personal and as communal as ours in the square last night.

The good news is that I get spared most memes; for whatever reason, they seem to pass me by.  Liz just tagged me with this one, though, and since she complied when she got tagged, I’ll do the same.  I want to note that this is hard, though; there are plenty of things you don’t know about me, but not so many that are (a) sufficiently interesting and (b) insufficiently private to write about here!

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After waking up at 3 this morning, utterly unable to sleep, and after struggling both before and after lunch to take a stupid nap, but finding myself too exhausted, and thus too hopped-up, to doze off, I finally fell asleep for a little while this afternoon.

And immediately had a protracted dream about sitting in a committee meeting at my institution.

And it was a committee I’m actually on!  Discussing an issue that we actually need to discuss!

And just to add insult to injury, a senior (male) member of the faculty whom I’ve never seen before wandered in and disrupted our meeting by telling a joke about how feminists have no sense of humor.  To which I responded with the ever-witty “if you said something funny, I’d laugh.” Except the rest of the committee was laughing.  And so I wound up appearing unreasonably bitter and uncollegial and sense-of-humorless.

Can you blame me?  All I want to do is get some freaking sleep, and I end up in a freaking committee meeting.

About six months ago, I published a lengthy post, both on Planned Obsolescence and on if:book, about the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publishing. At least some portion of that post was occasioned by Nature’s experiment with an open peer-review system. That experiment was closed earlier this month, and the editors have now analyzed the data resulting from it, and have declared the experiment to have failed, and have announced that “for now at least, we will not implement open peer review.”

The statistics that they cite are indeed indicative of some serious issues in the open system they implemented: only 5% of authors who submitted work during the trial agreed to have their papers opened to public comment; only 54% of those papers (or a 38 of a total of 71) received substantive comments. But I have to wonder whether the experiment wasn’t rigged from the beginning, destined for a predictable failure because of the trial’s constraints.

First, no real impetus was created for authors to open their papers to public review; as I noted back in June, the open portion of the peer review process was wholly optional, and had no bearing whatsoever on the editors’ decision to publish any given paper. And second, no incentive was created for commenters to participate in the process; why go to all the effort of reading and commenting on a paper if your comments serve no identifiable purpose?

What I want to ask at this point is what MediaCommons can learn from the ostensible failures of Nature’s experiment. How can we develop a successful open peer-review process with adequate author and reviewer buy-in?

Our first full day in Prague was spent in a state of mild to moderate delirium. After we finally arrived at the hotel on the evening of the 18th, R. and I found some food, drank a couple of beers, wandered briefly through the Christmas market in the Staromìstské námìstí, and tumbled into bed around 10.30 pm, expecting to remain unconscious until at least 7 am. Instead, we both woke up around 2 am, and not in a temporary sort of way. So about 2.30 am, we got up, pulled out our laptops, found power outlets, and sat down to see what would happen if we tried to do a bit of work.

For my part, I dug out my previously seized-up iPod, was pleased to see that it had finally run its battery out and shut itself off, and hooked it up to my computer. After a couple of moments of recharging (in which the screen dimly read “very low battery… please wait”), it rebooted, and the computer found it, and all appeared to be normal. I haven’t tried to play that video file again yet, but will soon, just to see if I can recreate the crash.

In any case, we sat around tinkering until about 4 am, and then decided to try sleeping again—and wound up sleeping like the dead until about 8 am. We got dressed, had a fabulous breakfast, and went to work—R. working on his novel, and me writing my annual professional activities report and putting together the last post.

This held us until about 1 pm, after which we headed out to wander around some and find some lunch. And thus began the next phase of the day: the desperate struggle to stay awake until 9 pm, which we considered the first acceptable moment at which we could go to sleep. R. suffered most in the early afternoon, and then seemed to snap back around 4 pm. My struggle began just as his let up, and continued through the evening.

Honestly, I’m not sure what we did after lunch. I seem to recall some more wandering around, making our way out to the Charles bridge, looking around for internet cafes or coffee houses with wi-fi. They’re much less plentiful than they were when we were here in 2003; I suspect that the comparative ease of obtaining broadband access at home is killing off public internet services. Indeed, our hotel, which in 2003 only had one computer in the business center and one in the club lounge wired for net access (and pretty creaky net access at that) now has wired internet access in every guest room and wireless in most public spaces. Of course, they’re charging about $30 per day for that access, which is way more than we wanted to spend; thus the hunt for the public facilities. (We finally wound up cutting a deal with the hotel’s manager for a package of several days of service at a bit of a discount, which is how this managed to get posted.)

At some point mid-afternoon, we wandered back to the hotel, showered and dressed, went down to the hotel bar for a beer (about the point at which R. began springing back to life and I began working really, really hard not to fall off my barstool), and then headed out in search of dinner. R. guided us along, wandering in a different direction than our usual well-trodden path toward the Staromìstské námìstí, and we began looking at menus along the way. I was far too delirious to judge, by this point, and so found myself looking only at prices. The Czechs are still using the kroner, and will do so until 2010, apparently, and so we’ve had to expend a bit of brain activity on thinking through price conversions. Finally, we just settled on a rough average of 20 kroner to the dollar, and let it go at that. So as we’re looking at menus, all I could think was, well, at this one, the numbers are all three digits and the average first digit is a 5, meaning that we’re looking at mains in the $18-20 range. When we found a place that had average first digits of 2, I suggested we give it a shot.

And the meal turned out to be amazing—I had a mixed grill that was just to die for, with a side of potato pancakes, and R. had a grilled sirloin that was just lovely. And the beer was both big and cheap. At some point during the meal, I looked at R. and said “this restaurant is really good. We need to figure out where it is.” He only looked at me oddly for a second, to his eternal credit.

By the time we were finished eating, I figured it was about 8 pm, and that we only had another hour of misery before we could fall into bed. Unfortunately, it was actually only 6 pm, so we wandered into the square to see what was going on in the Christmas market. And I’m happy as can be that we did, because what we found on the small stage at the edge of the market was a Christmas dance recital, in which small Czech girls ranging in age from 4 to perhaps 12 performed a series of dances ranging from the cute and bouncy to the unnervingly pre-teen erotic. All of them, though, were utterly unself-conscious, just having fun and not worrying at all about whether they missed a step, and the whole thing—the girls, the picture-taking parents, the other folks standing around watching in the cold—was utterly, utterly charming. As tired as I was, I was even more happy not to have missed it, and in fact got enough of a charge out of it as to wake up enough to make it to 9 pm.

We did crash at 9, though—and promptly woke up at 11, after what my body was convinced was a nice afternoon nap. This, unfortunately, has been the pattern ever since—I wake up after about three or four hours of sleep, and the only chance of getting back to sleep involves drugs. Today, I woke up at 3, lay in bed until 4, and finally just gave up. It’s now 6 am here, and I’m likely to crash sometime in the next few hours, but I’m hoping that if I tough it out, I might be able to sleep through the night tonight.

And I keep hoping for the possibility of more little dancing Czech kids. That’s worth staying awake for.