Alarmingly, we’ve hit the midpoint of spring break already, and this is the first time I’ve managed to post. I’ve meant to post every day — really, I have — but what with one thing and another…

• One thing: a really nasty cold that began settling in, of course, last Saturday.
• Another: the knowledge that these few days are the only bit of time to work on my chapter-in-progress for the foreseeable future.

Between having a head full of ideas about my project and a head full of best-left-undescribed other substances, I haven’t really given posting a second thought. The chapter is rocking along; I think I’m moving into the home stretch with it. And the cold is beginning to recede, thank goodness.

For now, though, just a quick update on my whereabouts for the coming weeks, partially by way of preemptive excuses for future lulls:

• Thursday and Friday, March 20 and 21: Fresno. I’m giving a talk at a colloquium on the future of the book at Cal State, Fresno, which is drawn from the chapter I’m madly trying to finish; fortunately, the talk will primarily focus on the background materials, which are firmly in place.
• Wednesday to Saturday, March 26 to 29: New Orleans. I’m giving a talk at Tulane on Thursday afternoon, drawn from another chapter of the project, and moderating a panel on Pynchon on Saturday at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.
• Thursday to Saturday, April 3 to 5: San Francisco. I’m giving a presentation at the NITLE Summit on my uses of Drupal and other web technologies in my teaching.

I’ll hope to blog some of the other talks at these events, which promise to be great. In the interim, however, back to preparing my own…

For the last couple of years, I’ve been a member of the executive committee of the MLA’s discussion group on literature and media (a group name that makes me a little bonkers). Each year, we sponsor one panel at the convention; this year’s call for papers is below. If you’re working on Second Life, please send Matt your proposal ASAP!

Session sponsored by the MLA’s Media and Literature Discussion Group
for the 2008 convention in San Francisco:

Second Lives: Reading and Writing Virtual Worlds

Second Life and other persistent virtual worlds, with preference to topics other than pedagogy. 1-page abstract and short vita by March 15 to Matthew Kirschenbaum, mgk AT umd DOT edu.

The symposium was a smashing success, I’m happy to report; the talks were all pitch-perfect and, for a Saturday, we got a respectable turnout. Honestly, though, I’d have been fine if it had just been me in the audience, at least on a certain level — I felt as though I’d thrown myself a day-long party, and if other people wanted to come, it was that much more fun.

All that said, I still feel like I’ve been beaten with a two-by-four for the last several days. It’s going to take a bit for me to recover — and given that I’m flying off to Philly for SCMS at oh-dark-thirty on Wednesday, I’m not going to have much opportunity.

Hopefully there’ll be more blogging, though, recovered or not; I’ve got a serious itch to get back to work, and want to post about it…

One presentation in this session on open access; notes below the fold.

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This morning’s first panel was on campus strategic planning initiatives.

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Final presentation of the day, from Dan Schnaidt, below the fold.

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Three excellent presentations in this session, below the fold.

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Today’s the NITLE conference on campus, beginning with a plenary panel on Scholarly Publication. My paper (based on my article, “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts”) was first, allowing me to relax and pay attention to the rest of the papers — which is great, because the next two papers were by Tim Burke and Laura Blankenship. My notes are below the fold; stupidity therein is my fault, not theirs.

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I spent most of yesterday working on cutting a 35-page paper down into the 15-20 minute talk I’ll be giving on Friday at a NITLE symposium on collaboration in the digital age, on a panel with Laura and Tim. Usually I find such cutting painful, but I was able to get through it fairly quickly. (That said, I am at the upper end of the time-frame, and if I were asked to whack out another two pages, I’d find it excruciating.)

Last night, I started building the slides to go along with the talk, and the irony was somewhat inescapable, as yesterday’s five years ago today post was in no small part about my skepticism at the announcement of Keynote. Did we really need “a happily Apple-y PowerPoint,” as I put it then, or should the goal really be less PowerPoint in the first place?

My answer today is yes, on both counts, in no small part because Keynote is less than PowerPoint: less bloated, less ugly, less of a pain. I’ve only really started using slides with my talks in the last year, and part of the change for me has been working through a non-sucky way to use them. My slides are simple: black text on a white background, no transitions and only the occasional very plain build. I never treat them as cue cards or, god forbid, a script; except for some quotations I want to call attention to, they never replicate long passages of what I’m saying; they aren’t endless bullet-pointed lists. And as such they’re pretty useless without the talk; they’re more for punctuation, and the occasional illustration, than they are for conveying ideas in any expository sense.

The slides, in effect, are utterly non-necessary, which makes me wonder whether I should bother spending the time on putting them together. I tend to find, though, that they help keep the audience focused on my ideas; the words “social interaction” on the screen can drive home the point of a sentence in a way that no amount of vocal emphasis can really manage.

So five years on: yay, Keynote! But less.

Recovering today after a quite wonderful MLA. I got to meet several people that I’d been hoping to introduce myself to for a while, I got to catch up with some old friends, and I got to attend and participate in a number of fantastic panels. Conferences always make me eager to be back in front of my computer, though, processing the ideas that have come up and putting together my own thoughts. So I’m off to do some of that processing now; I’ll hope to have exciting new stuff to share here soon.