I’m still running pretty much a day behind—meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:

The Chronicle reported yesterday that the ACLS had released a report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” examining the state of “cyberinfrastructure” in the humanities and social sciences, arguing—unsurprisingly, perhaps—that these “softer” areas of the academy have a long way to go in order to catch up with the levels of development and support available to the hard sciences. Among their recommendations is one near and dear to my heart: “Encourage digital scholarship.”

Today is also the final day in the summer institute on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UC San Diego, sponsored by (among other organizations), HASTAC.

I’m very much hoping to hear what comes out of that institute, and looking forward to seeing how the ACLS’s report is received…

One sure way to measure your network dependency is to live in a building in which broadband is included with your rent, and see how you respond when the Internet suddenly, completely, and inexplicably breaks.  And there is nothing you can do about it—no router you can reset, or DSL modem you can futz with, no customer service hotlines on which to hold.  There is only your apartment’s leasing and maintenance office, where you’ll be told, “uh, yeah—it’s broke.”

How many times do you turn to the computer to look something up, only to realize you can’t, before the aggravation really starts to kick in?

How long does it take before you pack up the laptop and head down to the coffee shop, the one with the open wi-fi?

How long before you start picking fights with roommates or family members?

How long before paralysis sets in, in which you feel it impossible to accomplish anything?

Just curious.

[UPDATE, 5.17.06, 11.00 am:  Yes, I changed the title of this post.  I’m so deranged by my lack of networked communication that I totally fumbled the support group reference.  And left the ball lying on the field for a full day.  What a maroon.]

I’ve spent much too much of this weekend wrestling with a series of thorny and utterly unnecessary technical problems related to various of my websites.  And I’m having a hard time making myself stop and do the things I actually need to be doing this weekend.  Like grading.  This is in no small part because dealing with these technical problems looks like work without really feeling like it, allowing me to spend hours and hours goofing off while still maintaining the appearance of productivity.

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I’ve nearly gotten through the copy-edited manuscript, which has been a pretty overwhelming and, at moments, frustrating task.  I’ve got six small queries yet to finish dealing with, three of which have to do with whether an emphasis appeared in the original text or if I added it when I quoted, and one of which similarly has to do with the use of an ellipsis in the original text.  All of this running-down of sources that I, in many cases, haven’t looked at in five years has produced a kind of paradoxical reaction in me:  on the one hand, I’m extraordinarily grateful for the web, and particularly for Google Print and for Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, each of which has allowed me to see several original texts without having to go track the physical copies down in the library.  This seems to me the best of what these services can do:  they’ve allowed me to check the page numbers on citations, to check weird wording in quotes, and to find the pagination for articles in volumes.

But at one and the same time, I’m immensely frustrated by the texts that I can’t get ahold of this way.  Some of them are in my personal library—but I can’t get into the office until later this morning, and would like to be able to access that information now, because once I get into the office I’m going to have office-type crises to deal with.  Most of the texts that I don’t own are in the library, but my relationship to the idea of “going to the library” has dramatically changed in the age of the web; physically walking across campus to that building over there requires a kind of time-investment that I can’t make right now, and that seems particularly problematic when all I need to chase down are three references.

Perhaps this is merely laziness speaking, but in an age when I can access almost any information via this magic box on my desk, those bits I can’t get at rankle all the more.  I’ll always want to do my primary reading of print copies—at least until there’s been another major change in the technology, of course—but for this kind of reference-consultation, I want everything available, and now.

Follow these directions:

1. Call Governor Schwartzenegger: 916-445-2841 (they’re apparently accepting calls from anywhere).

2. Push: 2 (voice your opinion on legislation).

3. Push: 1 (gender-neutral marriage bill - Senate Bill 849).

4. And push: 1 to support marriage equality.

Of course, the conspiracy theorist in my brain has me convinced that all the 1 calls are being dumped, while the 2s are being carefully tallied.  But we’ll see…

Somebody somewhere apparently crossed the streams earlier today, and everything around here went kerflooey.  Not in Claremont, at least not as far as I know; I’ve been at school all day, where the energy crisis of some years ago resulted in our being outfitted with mondo generators that we move seamlessly to in time of blackout.  But my otherwise fabulous and enormously reliable hosting provider went down sometime in the 1.15 pm vicinity, and the site only just came up moments ago.

Sigh.  And I was having such a good blog day.

Via a listserv I’m in, information about the Katrina PeopleFinder Project:

Donated money? Please donate a little time. Join the Katrina

PeopleFinder Project.

It’s easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to

copy data into a form.

http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/

Help_Needed#Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project

After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and

left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web

sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about

missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or

structure. So it’s almost impossible for people to search or match

things up. Plus there are dozens of sites - making it hard for a

person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about

missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting

as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read

unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the

relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

To get started please click here:

http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/

Help_Needed#Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project

Questions? Email katrina-people (at) activist-tech.org

Thanks!!!

The Katrina PeopleFinder Team

A friend of mine from back in the day directs me to the Hurricane Poets Check-In, where some information has been gathered about the status, as known, of a number of New Orleans writers.  Several of my friends are, happily, on the “found” list.  At least one is still missing.

I’ve still heard nothing about Trent, Maria, or Kenneth.  I’m still convinced they’re alive, but with much bigger issues ahead of them than contacting me.  But I’d just like to know.

[UPDATE, 9.30 pm:  Within seconds, I have word of Maria—she was on vacation in another part of the country during the hurricane, and so though her house has been completely destroyed (not something I want to dismiss of course, but nonetheless) she has survived.]

[UPDATE, 9.5.05, 6.24 am:  Trent is likewise safe.  Thank goodness.]

Air America has announced a service that they hope will assist people looking for missing loved ones:  Air America Public Voicemail.  From their announcement:

Air America Public Voicemail

1-866-217-6255

Call the toll-free number above, enter your everyday phone number, and then record a message. Other people who know your everyday phone number (even if it doesn’t work anymore) can call Emergency Voicemail, enter the phone number they associate with you, and hear your message.

You can also search for messages left by people whose phone numbers you know. Air America Radio will leave Public Voicemail in service for as long as this crisis continues. You can call it whenever you are trying to locate someone, or if you are trying to be found.

Obviously, for this to work, people need to know about it so please forward the number to as many people as you can. You can find out more about Katrina and the affected areas at www.airamericaradio.com.

A moment of true confessions:  I’m an obsessive stats watcher.  I love knowing who’s coming in and out of here, and how long they’re sticking around.  And I’m a bit obsessed, in a weird audience-research sort of way, with seeing what posts draw a crowd and what posts don’t, and with speculating about why.  It’s utterly meaningless, as I (thankfully) don’t actually use that information to change what’s going on around here.  It’s just amusing, is all, and I’m not quite sure why I find it so.

But, disclaimers aside, a bit of stats watching from the last few days:

I knew that the stuff with Tribble was going to cause something of an uptick, as the academic blogging world went to code orange, but I wasn’t expecting this much of a surge.  Nor was I expecting it to linger.  But I’m still most surprised here by the short-lived Taibbi frenzy.  It’s pretty much passed today—things seem pretty normal—but it was weird last night to catch the zeitgeist at work.

[P.S.:  Green = page loads; blue = unique visitors; orange = returning visitors.  Just FYI.]