Remember this kid? She, or someone like her, is at it again. Twice in the last two weeks I’ve had my Apple ID “disabled for security reasons,” which happens when someone tries to log into your account with the wrong password three times in a row. Each time, I’ve discovered what’s happened because I’ve suddenly gotten an email message from iForgot with a link enabling me to reset my password. And each time, I’ve reset it. So no real security breach has taken place, but each time I’ve had to propagate my new password through all the bits and pieces on my system that need it, which is enough of a pain that I’m now complaining about it.

Whoever you are: kfitzpatrick at mac dot com belongs to me (as does its relative, kfitzpatrick at me dot com). That’s not going to change. Please stop.

I’m getting loads of comment spam of late that is not bot-produced, but rather manually added, designed to generate google juice for some commercial site by taking advantage of the misimpression that this blog is a “do-follow” rather than a “no-follow” site. You might see an example of that in the comment most recently left on the MediaCommons post; the comment’s “author” was originally listed as something akin to “Buy My Product!”, and of course the URL given was the product’s website.

So here’s the deal: if I think your attempt to place an ad on my site is no more than that, you’re getting relegated to the spam bin. If I actually think the comment has some value despite being a lame attempt at increasing your page rank, I may keep it, but I’m deleting your author name and URL.

But let me clear up this misimpression here and now: this site does use the no-follow tag in all its commenter-added links. So please just save us both the trouble and stop. Thanks.

The following is a call for papers for a session sponsored by the MLA’s Media and Literature Discussion Group, to be held at the 2009 convention in Philadelphia.

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Media Studies and the Digital Scholarly Present

Not the future of digital scholarly publishing but the material form of such mediated communication as it exists today. 1-page abstract and short vita by March 15 to Kathleen Fitzpatrick, kfitzpatrick AT pomona DOT edu.

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The thing is so short in large part because the MLA gives us 35 characters for the entire description, title included. (Perhaps they get something about Twitter? CFP as tweet at 25% scale?) Oddly, though, having gotten it down to those specs, I find myself with not that much to add: we’re hoping that the panel will position itself in distinction to the many offerings about the future of digital scholarship by conducting an exploration of the material form of current digital publishing projects, from a media studies perspective.

The sneaky part of our motivation here lies in attempting to demonstrate to the MLA that not only does the organization need media studies in order to flourish into the future, but that media studies is already there, already doing the work that the MLA someday hopes to get to.

So: proposals or queries to me. I’ll hope to hear from you.

For all the folks who’ve been asking: CommentPress is back. I also have it on good authority that a major update will be coming soon.

Sneak a peek at what I apparently started thinking seriously about five years ago today. I’m not sure whether I should be amazed by the prescience of that post, or appalled that I haven’t gotten further yet…

Incidentally, I just found out that my proposal for MiT6 was accepted; I’ll hope to see some of you there in April.

The SPARC Campus-Based Publishing Resource Center has officially launched today, along with the guide to creating campus partnerships around publishing issues that Maria mentioned in her comment. I’m very much looking forward to diving in…

Yesterday, it probably goes without saying, was a big day, made so not only by the inauguration but also by the first day of classes of the new semester. And even more so, for me personally, by the long-awaited relaunch of MediaCommons. (We tried really hard to have the site ready to launch at noon eastern, but settled for six pm pacific.)

The site is now running in Drupal, which is going to allow us to focus more heavily in the coming weeks on developing the community aspects of the network. Already, however, we’re able to promote contributions to the site from the breadth of its membership; any scholar of media studies who creates an account at MediaCommons is now invited to blog there. We’re hoping that some folks will want to start new, research-specific blogs, and that others will want to re-post selectively from their existing blogs. In the coming weeks, we’re also going to begin aggregating a number of media studies blogs across the web, enriching the MediaCommons community by reflecting the breadth of work being done in the field today.

I hope that you’ll come by and check out both the main site and In Media Res, which has also relaunched in a spiffy new format, with vastly improved tagging and searching capabilities. We’re still working on things over there, so excuse any oddnesses you may run into; we’d call this release a beta if that term were really useful anymore. But we look forward to seeing — and more importantly, to hearing from you — there.

I’m in the midst of a section in the project in which I’m discussing the potential for strategic collaborations within universities around the issue of digital scholarly publishing. Among such collaborations, I point to a number between university presses and university libraries, including those at the University of Michigan and the University of California. Numerous other such library-press collaborations exist — but what I’m not currently finding is such a collaboration in which the university information technology center is an explicit and active participant. Do any of you know of such a program?

I finally got a chance at the very end of the MLA to sit down for coffee with Dave Parry, whom I’d tried but failed to catch up with at several earlier moments of the conference. Among the things we talked about (writing in public, digital scholarly publishing, etc.) was a brief bit of chat about our preferred writing technologies. Dave asked what I’m composing Planned Obsolescence in, and I told him that my initial chapter structures generally get put together as a massive text-editor brain dump, which at some point I import into Pages for finer writing and editing.

Dave mentioned doing a lot of writing in Scrivener, a drafting program I’d written about experimenting with some time back. The conversation made me ask myself why I’d decided not to draft in Scrivener, given how excited I remain about the package — and I never really came up with a good answer.

So I took a morning and imported the draft as it stood into a Scrivener document (or a “binder,” in fact, a cluster of documents and snippets that are working toward a draft), to see whether the interface might actually provide some benefits for the project as it stands.

Thus far, it has: being able to focus in on one section of the text, while maintaining a sense of the relationship between that section and the overall textual structure, works far better for me here than in the endless scrolling word processor window. And, as I mentioned in my last post, given my propensity for writing my way into holes, but my desire to keep writing and fill those holes later, Scrivenings’ annotation tools are quite useful.

Scrivenings is another system, like DEVONthink, that I’m pretty sure I’m not using to the fullest extent of its abilities, as yet, but I’m enjoying the process of figuring out how it can help me envision the structure of a big project, while keeping its bigness from becoming overwhelming.