The spring semester doesn’t start until tomorrow, but today’s the first day of the new regime: I got up early, I’m sitting at the computer for half an hour of focused writing (though I’ll admit that I did sneak a peek at my email, but didn’t actually respond to any of it), and later this morning I’m going to the gym. The essence of the new regime is pretty simple: I’m laying off of some of the bad-for-me stuff that I’ve been doing, and trying to build in more good-for-me stuff.

The good news is that, if I stick to it, it’ll likely take; I tend to respond well to discipline, and can really get into the swing of it once it’s in place. The bad news is that when my discipline breaks down, I have a tendency to go totally off the rails, wallowing in a way that progressively undermines everything that makes me feel good about myself in a long-range sense, in favor of things that will make me feel good right now.

So: this morning I turn over a new leaf. Somehow that metaphor has lost something in the digital, as I’ve got neither a calendar page nor a journal page to turn. But nonetheless: a new semester, a new regime, and a new blog post to mark the moment.

Which is less anxiety about the semester, per se, than anxiety about the fact that the break between semesters is all but over, and that I’ve still got an enormous pile of stuff that really needs to be done before the spring gets fully underway. And this spring — yeesh — promises to be nuts: between, say, February 28 and April 5, I have four speaking gigs plus a conference I’m organizing here in Claremont. And that’s just five weeks out of the fifteen ahead of me, which will otherwise be filled with teaching an overload, advising senior theses, and the usual spring administrative insanity.

So the countdown has begun: a precious few days remain in which I can hope to get anything done. If you don’t hear from me, you know where I am.

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.

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.