R. and I are just finishing up a long weekend away, spent in a very low-key way, if not exactly in a very low-key place, mostly holed up in a hotel working. I’ve gotten a good bit done — about two-thirds of my MLA presentation is now written (though it will need revising, no doubt, when that last third turns out to be twice as long as it ought to be), and I’ve done some reading I needed to do. It’s been a pretty blissful few days, in that regard, a brief flash of what it’s like to have an intellectual life that I have some kinds of control over.

Today, however, will be all about preparations for tomorrow: getting notes together for class, commenting on student work, and so forth. We’re into the home stretch now, with three more weeks of classes ahead of us. But in those three weeks there will also be four job candidate visits, plus advising and pre-registration for spring — oh, god, and then there’s spring, and I haven’t ordered my books yet, and…

I am trying not to feel the panic of time marching forward, trying to remember what these five days felt like, and further to remember that there are five weeks between finals and the start of next semester, and that I’ll have this kind of freedom to focus on my own work for the majority of that break. In the meantime, however, there’s other stuff to be done.

For the last three days, as I’ve faced my computer in my office, I’ve heard this insistent tapping at the windows in front of me; dozens of hornets buzzed outside, looking for ways in. A couple each day succeeded, sending me in search of campus maintenance, as I’m fairly seriously allergic to all sorts of flying, stinging insects. But even when they were safely outside, something about that tap tap tap, just barely above the level of my hearing, really had me on edge — a much too literal manifestation, I think, of the swarming demands currently begging for my attention.

I am, at the moment, just freaked out enough to feel the need to post this right away, though it’s one of those things that on further reflection may make me wish I’d waited. But…

I got a request from a former student a few minutes ago asking to add me to his LinkedIn network. After I accepted, I got this little window listing “People You May Know.” On this list are included:

– 4 former students (which, okay, that one’s fairly easy; educational info produces that connection, I guess, but how did they come up with three of my former students and one student whom I knew through residence life channels from among all the institution’s alumni?);
– a former colleague (ditto for job history info, but this is a former staff member who did not work in my department, but whom I knew fairly well);
– a colleague at another institution whom I know through conferences and blogging;
– another bloggy pal from another country with whom I attended a meeting;
– one person I actually don’t know, but really ought to;
– and my father. To whom I haven’t talked in a very long time.

I’m trying to come up with some rational, non-scary explanation for this, but am at the moment coming up dry. How LinkedIn am I, really?

My friends at the University of California Press and the California Digital Library project last week launched a beta version of the Mark Twain Project, an astonishing archive bringing together more than 2300 of Twain’s letters, painstakingly edited and catalogued, all searchable, with a robust citation-saving feature. The project will in the future include editions of Twain’s published writing as well.

From the press release:

Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) applies innovative technology to more than four decades of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

MTPO is a joint undertaking of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press. It is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mark Twain Project, and is supported by a number of institutions and individuals. The Mark Twain Foundation, a perpetual charitable trust that possesses the publication rights to all of Mark Twain’s writings, has given UC Press and Mark Twain Project Online exclusive rights to publish copyright-protected writings by Mark Twain, both in print and electronically.

At beta launch, the site will include more than twenty-three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880, including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals. Users will also be able to search for information about Mark Twain’s complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family. In future years, the site will release more of the nearly ten thousand known letters, including many never-before published; electronic editions of many of Mark Twain’s most famous literary works; the most complete catalog of Mark Twain’s writings currently available; and, in 2010, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, never before published in its complete form…

The customizable interface provides a powerful reading and research experience. The site offers users unprecedented access to authoritative transcriptions of Mark Twain’s writings and to compare those transcriptions side by side with facsimiles when available. Researchers can gather and store digital citations and links to selected documents, images, and other resources. These features are supported, in large part, by the California Digital Library’s eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) and the ongoing work of The Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI).

This project is of a kind that seems to me ideally suited for digital publishing; the costs of producing this kind of reference material in print couldn’t be justified by many presses, resulting in a multi-volume library-oriented set that would be much too expensive for most individual readers. Beyond that, however, the material itself becomes much more useful when it’s manipulable by the researcher (see, for instance, Scott Eric Kaufman’s early experience of the archive), and when the archive itself can grow as such research continues. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how the project develops from here.

The only problem with refocusing this blog on my research is that, of late, I’m not doing any, as, well, it’s November. This week, I have a set of project outlines and a set of term paper proposals to comment on, and then a series of small administrative things that need to get written: the copy to be used in publicizing the symposium I’m organizing for next semester; a proposal for a symposium for next academic year; a course description for spring; a speaker introduction. And then I need to sit myself down and write my MLA presentation. I’m going to do some portion of the drafting here, as Miriam began some time back. So with any luck, this space should play host to what appears to be actual writing in the very near future.