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.

I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively random bullets, just trying to capture some of what I’ve been pondering.

snow
Originally uploaded by KF

• The big-ass storm that pounded the west coast seems finally to have passed. The radar pictures I watched much of the weekend were quite dramatic — rain, at one point last night, stretching solidly from Palm Springs to the east to the coast, and from southern Orange County to well north of San Luis Obispo. Storms of that size are like a homecoming of a sort — one of a few things that I really miss from Louisiana — but they’re unusual enough to be a bit of a pain here: flooded streets, crap drivers, and a general creeping damp cold that my heating system can’t seem to overcome. On the upside, however, is that the storm has left us with enough snow that the desperation of this year’s drought might be a bit ameliorated.
• The first episode of season 5 of The Wire already has me hooked, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion: combine my absolute adoration for the show’s narrative strategies, its complex web of characters, and its focus on the systemic obstacles to really fixing serious social problems with the fact that, this year, the media provides the primary system in question, and I’m one hundred and four percent sold.
• I’m back to work on some MediaCommons projects, which I hope I’ll have more to show for, soon.
• I’m also attempting to move forward with my own writing projects, but as usual, they’re getting short shrift. I keep saying that I want to find ways to integrate that writing with posting here, and I keep not following through. I’m determined to get some blog mileage out of the research I’m doing right now, though, and some project mileage out of the blog, too. I’d call it a new year’s resolution if I really believed in those.

More from the homefront, soon.

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.

The last few days have been a blur of travel and family, all of which I survived, though not without some bumps along the way. I’m happily ensconced in my hotel room in Chicago now, though, awaiting what promises to be the most action-packed MLA I’ve experienced.*

If you’re around and want to say hi, you can likely find me at many of the various panels thoughtfully put together by the Association for Computers and the Humanities**, including of course my own. I’ll hope to see some of you there.

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*Not counting MLAs at which I’ve conducted interviews, I guess, but those are hard for me to characterize as action-packed, really, as sitting in a hotel room talking for hours on end hardly strikes me as action.

**[Updated, 12.27.07, 9.34 am: I must have been more tired than I thought I was last night. The panels themselves have been put together by various entities, only one of which is ACH; the list of panels was collated by ACH. Sheesh.]

I received a very nice and fairly apologetic note today, informing me that I was not elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.

This is one of those cases when saying “it’s an honor just to have been nominated” really, really applies. Though I’m not entirely sure that the “just” is in the right place.

The real beauty part of having teeny tiny little classes, as I’ve always suspected but never really gotten to experience, is that grading goes fast. One can zip through everything in a day or two, and get on with the important business of one’s life. Like, say, finishing that paper you have to give in nine days that still isn’t quite done. Or, perhaps, packing for the holiday trip that suddenly begins tomorrow for which you are entirely unprepared. Or even remembering what it feels like to write a blog entry about nothing in particular.

Let the break begin! I hope yours is as good as mine is promising to be.

So a pal of mine has just drawn my attention to an interesting article in the L.A. Times from about ten days or so ago on responses to the Kindle. The article attempts to look fairly neutrally at the object itself, what it gets right and what it gets wrong, as well as at the responses to the object.

The most interesting parts of the article, for my purposes, are the anti-Kindle screeds on the part of those who would defend the print-on-paper codex from all apparent technological threats. And the absolute best part of that is the response by Jonathan Franzen.

You’d think Franzen would have learned to keep his mouth shut (and email unsent) around reporters.

As Aunt B. has already pointed out, he manages to make an utter fool of himself by insisting that the only way to truly experience Shakespeare is to read it in print, as was originally intended. But my favorite line of Franzen’s is this one:

“Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”

Because pixels are some sneaky lying little bastards.

Sigh,
KF

I’ve just found out that The Anxiety of Obsolescence has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Now that is a nice note to end the semester on.