Among the kinds of texts that we’ve repeatedly noted as potential forms for MediaCommons to explore is what I’ve previously referred to as the “digital casebook,” an evolution of the anthology that allows scholars working on a single text, such as a television series, to produce an organically developing repository of scholarly materials about and around their subject of interest. This idea has developed into a proposal for what we’re now thinking of as the MediaCommons Series Casefiles (“files” here intended as a means of escaping the confines of the “book”). The proposal itself is below the fold, but we’d very much like to hear your comments, questions, and other responses over at MediaCommons, in order to further develop the idea as we proceed.

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In which I attempt to figure out whether my computer, or WordPress, or the internet more generally has a problem with the 31st of July. I posted an entry on the MediaCommons blog earlier this morning, but for whatever reason the permalinks to that entry totally fail. And Quicken was very wonky this morning when I asked it for some data over the last year (i.e., 31 July 2006 to 31 July 2007). There isn’t something going on no one’s told me about, right, like 31 July is the new 29 February? Or could it be the Y2K bug, just forestalled for seven years and seven months?

There’s much I’d like to post about, but there’s only been steadfast, nose-to-grindstone work today, in part because I’m feeling that last week running through the hourglass mighty quickly, but in part because I spent the weekend with Harry Potter, both in print and on film. No spoilers here, I swear; just two quick non-spoily observations, given that my print experience was the Brit edition and my film experience had French subtitles:

1. The French have translated a lot of proper nouns. Like “Hogwarts,” which becomes, if I’m remembering correctly, “Poudlard,” which at least suggests “hog” through its bacony reference, but within which “poud” doesn’t seem to mean anything. (Unless it’s “powdered bacon,” and then I’m even more bemused.) And “Crookshanks,” which becomes “Pattenrond,” which seems like a sort of Germanified “round feet,” which makes a certain sense, I guess, but, I don’t know, loses something in the translation.

2. There sure seems to me to be a lot more “blimey!” in the Brit edition, despite the U.S. editor’s insistence that “there are virtually no differences in the texts of the last few books.”

And with those utterly beside the point but non-secret-giving-away comments, back to work….

I’ve been taking all my research notes in TextMate for a while now, which, as text editors go, is really way more powerful than what I need. What I like about it, though, is the notion of the “project” — a cluster of text docs that you designate as being somehow related. I have this project called, brilliantly, “notes,” through which I’ve related most of my work-based notes, whether notes on projects, notes from conferences or conference calls, or notes on reading. In the project drawer there are several little folders that group those notes in meaningful ways, and using that drawer, I can open and close whichever of them I need at any given moment. In tabs. That’s the key point: TextMate has tabbed editing windows.

But it’s also got this groovy feature that I’ve been using like crazy in the last few days: completion. Say there’s a word you’ve typed earlier in your document, as you’ve been taking your research notes, and say it’s a word that comes up a lot, and is really annoying to type. Like “antidescriptivism.” Once you’ve typed it once, you can type the first few letters, like “ant,” and then hit the escape key, and TextMate will automatically complete the word with the last word you typed that began with “ant.” But say that the second time I need the word, I actually need “antidescriptivist”? So I complete, I hit backspace and change the “m” to a “t,” and I’m done. Now, the next time I type “ant” and hit escape, TextMate will finish the word with “antidescriptivist,” but if I really wanted “antidescriptivism,” all I have to do is hit escape a second time, to get the second-to-last word I typed that began with “ant.”

This is saving me enormous amounts of time. How much? Enough, I hope, to write this post about it.

I had a great IM chat with Stephanie Booth this morning. I met Stephanie at Blogtalk back in October, and she pinged me today to tell me about an article of hers that’s just gone up, on MySpace and online predator paranoia. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned her attempts to find journalists in Switzerland who were interested in covering such issues from angles other than the “my god, won’t somebody think of the children?” tactic that the vast majority of coverage adopts. I linked this to what Bryan Alexander has referred to as the “[Fill in Name of Web 2.0 Phenomenon]: Threat or Menace?” narrative that abounds in most news venues these days — and then realized that the argument I made in The Anxiety of Obsolescence may in fact be more applicable here than it was to the novel’s relationship to television. As traditional, mainstream sources of information — newspapers, radio, television — feel themselves being eclipsed by the newer forms of communication that the digital provides, their characterizations of those new forms reveal far less about the digital itself than they do about old media’s anxieties about its future.

Interestingly, just yesterday I found out about what I believe to be the first review of The Anxiety of Obsolescence, which appeared in the June 2007 issue of Choice. I’ve, erm, quoted rather liberally from the review here. Needless to say, it’s gratifying to have the book be referred to as “essential”…

I haven’t gotten to read the full report yet, but the Chronicle’s article today on the release of the Ithaka report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, is extremely promising. The report calls universities to task for their failures to recognize the ways that digital modes of communication are reshaping the ways that scholarly communication takes place, resulting in, as they say, “a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.”

Perhaps I’ll find this when I read the full report, but it seems to me that the inverse is perversely true as well, that the stated “important values of the academy” — those that have us clinging to established models of authority as embodied in traditional publishing structures — are increasingly out of step with the ways scholarly communication actually takes place today, and the new modes of authority that the digital makes possible. This is the gap that MediaCommons hopes to bridge, not just updating the scholarly publishing industry, but updating the ways that academic assessments of authority are conducted.

The Institute for the Future of the Book has today announced the release of its open source WordPress theme, CommentPress, which allows for easy online publication and discussion of a wide range of documents. My article on scholarly publishing, released earlier this spring by MediaCommons, was published in an early draft of CommentPress, and I’ve now put the finished release into use on a paper-in-development that’s, appropriately, about CommentPress.

Stop by if:book, download CommentPress, and read (and discuss) all about it…

The database anthology I’m on the editorial board of is going into a second edition, of sorts — we’re adding a fair number of new texts and cleaning up some issues with the old ones. For this second edition, I’ve produced a very brief essay introducing students to some of the methods used in basic literary research. The draft is below the fold. Bearing in mind a couple of things — first, that the audience for this essay is generally first- or second-year college students in a class called something like “Introduction to Literature”; second, that there are other such essays taking on issues like textual analysis and so forth — what are your responses? I’ve primarily aimed the essay at my own pet peeves about the ways that my students do (or don’t do) research, but no doubt you’ve got your own. What else should I include here?

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It’s raining again! And it looks like it’s going to rain all day!

First off, there are still two full weeks left, plus a full day of packing. And the longest time I’ve spent here before was two weeks, so it’s just like that trip all over again.

Secondly, I’ve begun thinking to myself of things that I will actually kinda look forward to upon getting back home. Not in an ugly-American, everything in Europe is so old kind of way, but in a you know, I guess things here aren’t all bad kind of way.

Like a shower I can turn around in without bumping into something. A plumbing system that allows someone to flush the toilet while someone else is in said shower without said someone else getting alternately scalded and then frozen. A bed so big it deserves its own zip code.

Then there’s the stuff that I just need to get back to: like my gym, and a predominantly vegetable-oriented diet. Mostly because I’ll be bringing back some unwanted extra baggage home with me.

But I’m in no hurry. I’m really hoping that these turn out to be two very, very long weeks.