– The box has been resent, via a much more expensive but apparently trackable commercial carrier, who promises that it will arrive on Monday, July 9, at 11.30 pm. I am fascinated, both by the apparently round-the-clock deliveries they provide and by their precision. Or, is this just their way of saying “by the end of the day”? I’ll be keeping watch online, and will spend the day sitting on the damned doorstep, if I need to.

– Which I may: there is no sign whatsoever of the Amazon.co.uk package. Which is of course NOT trackable. I’m grinding my teeth rather than even get started on this one.

– I’m at work on an article that’s gotten me all excited, all of a sudden. But it requires me to know much more about the histories of reading and publishing than I currently do. I’m enjoying the reading, but unfortunately there’s only so much stuff accessible electronically. The point that I’m trying to make has to do with the social networks to which various forms of publishing have given rise and/or within which they have flourished. I.e., newspapers/pamphlets and coffeehouses; books and libraries. I’ll renew my bleg here — if there’s somebody you’d insist I ought to be reading on the interconnection between the material and the social systems of publishing, let me know.

– The good news is that this means that I’m making headway on one of the three — no, make that four — writing projects that I’ve got ahead of me for the rest of the summer. I’m afraid I’m about to have to put that one aside briefly, as another starts nudging me more intently, but it’s awfully nice to feel like I’ve got some kind of momentum.

– In the meantime, we’ll be headed off to Marcus’s opening in a little while. A nice moment of reminder that I’m not just anywhere, but actually in Paris.

– Apropos of which, posts to come, I hope, about (1) the astonishing dinner R. took me out to last night, and (2) the ways that my spoken French, while continuing to suck, is gradually managing to suck less.

Bon weekend, tout le monde.

The good news is that the mystery box has been found!

The bad news is that it has been found at my house in California.

The good news is that I have a housesitter armed and ready to ship it again!

The bad news is that I have no confidence whatsoever in the ability of either of the national mail systems involved.

The good news is that there are commercial alternatives which are, granted, much pricier, but which come with certain kinds of increased accountability!

The bad news is…

I hesitate, at this point, to contemplate the potential bad news. I’ve got five weeks left here, and I’m determined to be wholly optimistic about them. We’ll see how far that gets me.

There’s always something very odd about being in a place where the 4th of July is only… July 4.

Have a happy one back there, all. Eat something flame-grilled for me.

1. The box of them (a.k.a. le colis de mystère) is still nowhere to be found. The USPS remains clueless. La Poste no longer acknowledges that there was once a package with the number they’d assigned to it.

2. The ones I ordered, estimated to arrive sometime between Monday and today, haven’t. At least yet.

3. I cannot be positive, but I believe that in the missing box was a book about the history of the book, which it turns out I desperately need right now, not for the project I thought I needed it for, but for another one that I didn’t know I was going to be working on. So I’m about to start searching for decent online sources on the history of the book, because I don’t want to tempt fate by attempting to have any more books shipped to me. If you know of good sources that I should look at, please send them my way. Electronically.

It’s gray and rainy here in Paris today, which is actually kind of awesome because it enables me to refrain from feeling guilty that I’m sitting here at the computer, again, rather than being out in the streets wearing fabulous scarves and shopping in open-air markets.

On the other hand, the rain isn’t doing great things for my morale. And my morale is already suffering a bit today, under the weight of my to-do list. The good news is that all of these to-dos are my very own projects — nothing handed me via email (and yes, as of 11.23 am CET, the inbox remains empty), nothing that I owe anyone else. But the problem is that I’ve got three major projects that I want to be working on, and I’m not doing a fabulous job of dividing my time among them.

The morale problem comes from two different directions: on the one hand, my sense of the summer zipping by, and my fear that, come August 15, when I really must turn my attention back to stuff-for-others, I won’t have completed any of the three, but will instead have managed dribs and drabs on each. And, on the other hand, the tyranny of the empty window: for two of these projects, the next thing I need to do is write, and I’m having no small difficulty getting started.

I’m curious what your strategies for getting out of such cul-de-sacs are. The getting-started-writing problem is one I’ve encountered repeatedly, and the best way I know to handle it is simply the head-against-the-brick-wall mode of setting a timer each morning and doing nothing but staring at that document, putting down whatever crap sentences one can manage. Usually the first two days of that regime are excruciating, but by about the third, something starts to break loose, and the head-banging turns into actual writing.

But I don’t have good strategies for the multiple-projects problem. When you really need to be working on two things at once, how do you divide your focus? Two separate timers, with two separate writing windows, each banged against each day? Or two timers, two windows, but only in sequence — full attention given to one until it’s complete, and then full attention to the other?

Must post quickly, because I know it won’t last, but: as of 2.43 pm CET today, my email inbox is completely, 100% empty. In fact, so are the inboxes for all four of my accounts. I’ve taken care of everything that had been lingering in there, and I’m entirely on to new business.

I thought that I’d find myself suddenly able to breathe again, once I achieved such emptiness, but instead I find it a little bit vertigo-inducing, as if I’m perversely holding my breath, waiting for the next batch of tasks to come sailing in.

One of the speakers at the “New Structures, New Texts” summit in early June was Michael Jensen, the director of web communication for the National Academies, as well as the director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press. His talk was the one that most captured my attention of the course of the day, intersecting as it did with MediaCommons’s key interest in redefining the processes and purposes of peer review.

The talk was based in part on two articles of his, one in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and one that was published shortly after the summit in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s this latter piece that I’m most interested in, at the moment, as Jensen here lays side by side the authority models of traditional scholarship (which are based, as he points out, on an assumption of information scarcity) and of “web 2.0″ (which are based on information abundance), and attempts to project what the values of “authority 3.0″ might be, how it might be computed, and, most crucially, what scholars and institutions need to start thinking about in order to be ready to participate — as authors, as researchers, as evaluators — in such a model.

As Jensen points out, most people talking about things “3.0″ today are focused on creating modes of algorithmic filtration and other forms of artificial intelligence in order to cope with increasing information abundance; these technologies will no doubt have powerful effects on the ways that authority — whether scholarly or otherwise — is measured. Included amongst the factors that “authority 3.0″ algorithms will likely take into consideration, Jensen indicates, are:

- Prestige of the publisher (if any).
- Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
- Prestige of commenters and other participants.
- Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
- Raw links to the document.
- Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
- Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
- Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
- Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what’s its authority status?
- Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
- Quality of author’s institutional affiliation(s).
- Significance of author’s other work.
- Amount of author’s participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
- Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
- Length of time a document has existed.
- Inclusion of a document in lists of “best of,” in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
- Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

I’m particularly interested in the inclusion of “peer prereviewers” — and in particular the specification of “pre” in that designation — as only one in a long list of other metrics, and a caveated one (”if any”), at that. MediaCommons is, as we discussed at some length at this spring’s editorial board meeting, interested in the development of a mode of “peer-to-peer review” that would take into account both a qualitative assessment of the comments made on a scholarly text and more web-native metrics such as links, downloads, tagging, and so forth. Implicit in this model, however, is a sense that the most important thing we’ll be working on, in developing peer-to-peer review, is a schema for “reviewing the reviewers,” for determining not just the authority of a text but the authority of the commentary on that text.

As MediaCommons moves forward, we’re hoping to provide the tools for scholars to have a hand in developing such systems. Right now, we’ve got a number of “sociable” bookmarking buttons that appear beneath both blog posts and In Media Res entries, and we’re working on ensuring that various forms of metadata (including COinS) that will be important to tracking the life of electronic documents will be embedded in everything we publish. As with everything, however, we need significant user input, to ensure that the technological network we’re building develops in concert with the human network that it will serve. So: what are the metrics we need to include both in the review of texts and in the review of the reviewers? How should those metrics themselves be evaluated? What is at stake for members of the network (whether authors, researchers, or more casual readers) in the inclusion and contextualization of those metrics? And what do we need to do, now, to communicate to our institutions that this is, in fact, the future of scholarly authority, and is thus a model of assessment that must be taken seriously by hiring, retention, and promotion committees?