Thankfully, other folks are doing a much better job of responding to this horror than I can right now, so I’ll just direct you their way, except to say a quiet thank you for a life of extraordinary courage, and a small prayer of hope that this act of terrorism might be recognized for what it is.

[Update, 2.29 pm: Holy effing crap. This is what I'm talking about: "[Randall] Terry said he was now concerned that the Obama administration ‘will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions.’” Am I wrong in interpreting “our most effective rhetoric and actions” as acts specifically designed to terrorize?]

I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.

Soon, at least.

It’s been a heck of a week: long flight into Boston on Monday, followed by looooong cab ride out to Norwood just after midnight Tuesday morning; phenomenal symposium on the future of everything Tuesday; train back up to Boston, followed by lunch with an editor, a glass of wine with a colleague, and dinner with a former student on Wednesday; the American Literature Association (which I’d link to, but man, they really need a new website, as this one doesn’t so much load as download — literally, it’s a bunch of Word documents) starting Thursday, including my own panel yesterday, sponsored by the Digital Americanists, on the peer review of digital scholarship. And, of course, a round of dinners and such with old friends.

It’s been amazing, but I’m exhausted, and looking forward to today’s long flights home, during which I hope to get the summer started, for real. Here’s wishing all of you a lovely Memorial Day weekend, and hoping that your summers begin well, as well…

Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they hope to work with other disciplinary organizations as well.

But the key moments of her post come after that announcement, as she ponders what the basis for tenure decisions ought to be:

The basic question is not have you published that book. The fundamental question is, based on one’s first six or seven years in the profession, is one likely to be a lifelong, energetic, idea-filled, responsible, creative, innovative contributor to the profession, even when the Damocles’ Sword of tenure is no longer swinging above.

And:

How in the world can a “floor” requirement ever predict future performance? That is, if you establish a quantitative measure, such as one book for tenure, two books for full professor, what in the world are you saying about future contributions? You achieve the measure and then you stop? Really? Is that the ideology of tenure?

The point of the tenure evaluation is supposed to be using a scholar’s past performance as a predictor of continuing performance — on some level, the existence of the first book is meant to stand in for all the future books that will follow. For too many scholars, though, the book requirement becomes a literal end in itself, a finish line that, once crossed, leaves the scholar without future direction or motivation.

So what if we were to say, forget the book, or whatever number of articles one were to set, and instead focus the standards for tenure on the demonstration of an active, ongoing research agenda? How many different forms might meet these new standards? What new kinds of scholarly engagement might we foster?

I’m in the Boston area this week, speaking at a couple of conferences, the first of which is starting as I type — a meeting sponsored by AcademicCommons, a special interest group of NERCOMP (the Northeast Regional Computing Program), entitled “The Future of Everything.” We’ll be twittering at #acfoe, and posting links on delicious.

Later this week, I’ll be at the American Literature Association, hanging out with the Digital Americanists and talking about the future of peer review. Actually, that’s what I’m talking about here, too. It’ll be interesting to compare the responses…

Just now via email:

Dear Colleagues:

It is with a very great regret that we are announcing the cancellation of the SCMS conference in Tokyo scheduled for May 21-24, 2009.

Late last week we learned that the Government of Japan and the Chiyoda District Government had requested that Josai International University cancel the conference due to concerns about containing the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) virus. That request, and the conditions that were subsequently imposed under which the conference might occur, resulted in daily discussions among the officers of SCMS, members of the Board of Directors, the Society’s legal counsel, and representatives of Josai.

We have determined that proceeding with the conference under the conditions ordered by the government presents too many risks for our members and the Society. These include the personal risks to individual members (including possible quarantine, additional expense, and considerable stress), potential liability to SCMS, as well as pressures on the Society’s small infrastructure. Moreover, the survey conducted yesterday (564 of 748 registrants replied) indicated that almost one-third of those responding chose to withdraw from the conference. Many of those who said that they would still attend indicated that they would do so out of a sense of obligation or said that they would spend minimal time at the conference. It was also clear that some registrants who did not respond to the survey, but who communicated in other ways, were waiting for more information before making a decision.

We are extremely grateful for the efforts of JIU, on behalf of SCMS, for negotiating with the national and local governments to create conditions under which the conference could move forward. But it is clear that members felt that those conditions would not be conducive to a satisfactory conference experience. The high cancellation rate – with more likely – presented us with a depleted program rather than the robust intellectual and social experience our members have come to expect of the SCMS conference.

* You are urged to cancel your hotel reservations and flights immediately, unless you plan to travel to Japan for pleasure. You should contact your airline to arrange for credit on your airfare. We will be working with Japan Travel Bureau to reduce or eliminate hotel cancellation penalties.
* Conference fees will be refunded, or individuals may request that their registration fee be used for the 2010 conference in Los Angeles. More details will follow.
* We are working on plans to retain as much of the Tokyo conference as possible as a part of our Los Angeles conference. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
* We will be creating a forum on the SCMS website for individuals to register their comments.
* If you have already arrived in Japan and need assistance, please contact the SCMS office staff as soon as possible. Others can expect their e-mail messages and phone calls to be answered in the order that are received as soon as the staff can respond.

This has been a severe trial for the SCMS leadership, and we realize that the uncertainty caused by this global health situation has created great confusion and anxiety among our members.

We are extremely disappointed that we have had to make this decision, especially in light of the tremendous amount of planning and work that our members, the SCMS staff, and our exhibitors committed to this conference. Again, we offer our heartfelt gratitude to the Chancellor of Josai and Josai International Universities, Dean En Fukuyuki, Shinozaki Kayo and the rest of the staff at JIU who generously offered his or her services above and beyond any duties, responsibilities, or obligations and on top of their already considerable responsibilities at JIU.

We are saddened that we will not be able to meet in Tokyo, but when the dust settles, we look forward to a combined Tokyo/Los Angeles conference to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, which will represent the very best of who we are and what we do.

Sincerely,

Patrice Petro, President
Anne Friedberg, President-Elect
Stephen Prince, Past-President
Eric Schaefer, Secretary
Paula Massood, Treasurer
Scott Curtis, Member of the Board
F. Hollis Griffin, Graduate Student Representative
Michele Hilmes, Member of the Board
Priya Jaikumar, Member of the Board
Victoria Johnson, Member of the Board
Charles Wolfe, Member of the Board
Michael Zryd, Member of the Board

Noah Wardrip-Fruin has posted a thoughtful reconsideration of the experience of putting the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing, through an open peer review process at Grand Text Auto, meditating on a few surprises that he encountered along the way.

Among these surprises, he notes one that I’m particularly glad to hear about, as it seems to me to refute the thing that several people have said to me about this experiment: “yeah, but even Noah said it didn’t really work.” Or at least not as well as traditional review. As Noah puts it,

One concern expressed repeatedly about the blog-based review form — by blog commenters, outside observers, and myself — is that its organization around individual sections might contribute to a “forest for the trees” phenomenon. While individual sections and their topics are important to a book, it is really by the wider argument and project that most books are judged. I worried the blog-based review form might be worse than useless if its impact was to turn authors (myself included) away from major, systemic issues with manuscripts and toward the section-specific comments of blog visitors with little sense of the book’s project.

This concern was heightened by comments made by some commenters, including Ian Bogost, who noted that he was having difficulty following the argument through from section to section. As it turns out, Noah notes, that difficulty was itself a key bit of review:

When the press-solicited anonymous reviews came in, however, they turned this concern on its head. This is because the blog-based and anonymous reviews both pointed to the same primary revision for the manuscript: distributing the main argument more broadly through the different chapters and sections, rather than concentrating it largely in a dense opening chapter. What had seemed like a confirmation of one of our early fears about this form of review — the possibility of losing the argument’s thread — was actually a successful identification, by the blog-based reviewers, of a problem with the manuscript also seen by the anonymous reviewers.

Noah notes that the success of his review process was contingent on the prior existence and functioning of the Grand Text Auto community, and of the commitment of time and expertise on the part of many dedicated readers. This reflection makes me increasingly hopeful that MediaCommons might develop a similarly successful set of review processes, precisely by focusing its development on the social network.

Add this to the list of difficulties presented by holding SCMS in Tokyo this year: the government apparently asked the university at which the conference is being held to cancel [edited to add: due to H1N1, of course!], but the university resisted, instead negotiating the following conditions:

1) To monitor the situation and inform conference participants of any outbreak, the government requires information regarding each participant’s whereabouts, including hotel location and contact numbers during the conference and for ten days afterward.

2) Conference participants will have their temperatures taken when they enter the conference each day. Those registering a temperature above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit will be given an additional test to rule out the H1N1 virus. If the test is positive, there is a chance that conference participants, along with the infected individual, could be quarantined.

3) Participants will need to fill out a health declaration form each day of the conference. The declaration will ask about symptoms (including fever, nausea, dizziness, etc.) experienced during the past twenty-four hours.

4) Participants will be required to wear surgical masks during the conference.

5) If the World Health Organization raises the alert level to phase 6 (either before or during the conference), or if a conference participant is found to have the H1N1 virus, then we will be required to cancel the conference. This could happen anytime up to and including the conference dates. Any potential financial costs resulting from quarantine and associated delays are the responsibility of the traveler; the Society is not responsible for these costs, and members traveling agree to incur them.

I was opposed to holding the conference in Tokyo this year (and in London two years ago) because of the prohibitive cost of attending for students and underemployed faculty. But this… well, I’m still glad I’m not going, but am at the same time perversely sorry not to be able to see hundreds of academics having their temperatures taken and wearing surgical masks each day…

I began the summer’s work yesterday morning by starting a read-through of the manuscript thus far, and was thrilled to discover that the introduction is not as far off as I thought it was. It needs a bit of tinkering, but a small enough bit that I’m comfortable putting it in the category of “revision.” So here’s what I think needs to be done between now and August 14:

– finish last section of Chapter 5 (on the university)
– research and write Chapter 4 (on the library)
– figure out how to turn CommentPress article into Chapter 3 (on networked publishing structures)
– possibly write a conclusion
– revise!

It’s not as bad as I feared, but it still makes me want to hyperventilate.

Today is the last day of what has been alternately a difficult and an exhilarating semester. Honestly, it’s the first semester in I can’t remember how long that I’ve been sorry to see end, the first semester in several years in which I’ve actually felt good about my teaching way more often than I’ve felt badly about it. But it’s also been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. And a good deal of both the up and the down of it all has been attributable to the class I taught this semester on the work of my late colleague, David Foster Wallace.
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