Hippo Dignity

I remember, back in the mid-90s, showing a grad school friend how to use Netscape. When she clicked on a link and the screen changed, she nearly jumped out of her seat in shock.

Nice to know not that much has changed in academia higher education in the humanities. (Change as per that extremely academic virus-lover Ian.)

Via Crooked Timber, I found this choice quote from a Michael Bérubé essay in Inside Higher Education. Bérubé was on the MLA committee that just recommended major changes in the tenure process, and his essay addresses some of the forces that led them to suggest large changes.

About the digital age, most doctoral departments are largely clueless: 40.8 percent report no experience evaluating journal articles in electronic format, and almost two-thirds (65.7 percent) report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. This despite the fact that the journal Postmodern Culture, which exists only in electronic form, has just celebrated its 15th birthday. Online journals have been around for some time now, and online scholarship is of the same quality as print media, but referees’ and tenure committees’ expectations for the medium have lagged far behind the developments in the digital scholarly world. As Sean Latham, one of the members of the Task Force, said at the 2005 MLA convention in Washington, “If we read something through Project Muse, are we supposed to feel better because somewhere there is a print copy?” For too many scholars, the answer is yes…

Criticism, at its best, ought to be an engagement with the critic’s own culture as well as with the work being discussed. For digital scholarship to be ignored by tenure committees, and therefore actively discouraged to the junior faculty hoping to impress them, is to cut off a major developing form of engaging with modern culture from the ongoing discussion among literature departments. It’s those departments, not the intarweb, that will lose out on this one.

(In other fun news, Bérubé notes that when you do the math, 34 of every 100 Ph.D.s in the MLA’s member fields gets tenure. Do you feel lucky, punk?)

Yesterday, I heard the mother of two young kids talk about how her kids played with European-made toys, and educational games, and anything electronic or beeping was banned from her house or had the batteries removed.

After I put her on a mental “no fun at parties” list, I found myself thinking about those kids, and the difference between them and my nieces, whose playroom is full of stuff that beeps and whirs and responds to button pushes, often to the point where I feel overwhelmed by it and say “hey, how about these stuffed animals? Or a book?” So it’s not like I don’t understand where that mother was coming from. But at the same time, I’m awed by how normal smart devices are to my nieces and small cousin.

To these kids, most of the things that AT&T promised in those “You will” ads a decade ago, the ones that seemed wildly futuristic back then, are just the way the world works. Of course the car tells you how to get where you’re going! Why wouldn’t it? And of course there are toys where you push a button and it says a letter or a number or a word. I’ve seen all three kids figure out how to work complex stuffed animal interfaces (push this button for a lullaby! push this one for a morning song!) well ahead of the adults in the room, and look absolutely delighted at their accomplishments.

It seems to me that in trying to protect her kids from the supposedly brain-rotting effects of toys that do some of the work of play for you, not to mention protecting herself from the godawful noise, that mother I heard might actually be hampering her kids in a way, by keeping them from developing an interface literacy that’s going to be second nature to all of their peers when they get to school. It’s like the kids I grew up with whose parents wouldn’t have a TV in the house — except, instead of not getting shared-reference pop-culture jokes, those kids won’t get interface conventions that will be as obvious to their peers as breathing. Assuming we make it that far, of course, the makers of the smart devices of those children’s adulthoods will presume that deep interface knowledge, and build on it, and surround them with it, and there won’t be someone there to take out the batteries.

(Of course, I don’t think that’s a problem these obviously well-cared-for and thoughtfully-raised children won’t be able to live with, and parents should make their own choices about raising their children. Standard disclaimers apply!)

…means ending Thanksgiving Day by watching a video of Arlo Gurthrie performing “Alice’s Restaurant” on his freakin’ MySpace page.

Happy tryptophan, each and every one.

I am probably required by the Laws of the Intarweb to note that my employer has finally succumbed to the inevitability of rhyme and launched the frogblog. Not much content there so far, but it’s already attracting some surprising commenters.

Big ups to header-quote-provider Richard Powers, whose new novel The Echo Maker won The National Book Award for fiction last night.

I have a copy of The Echo Maker, bought at a Borders in Chicago with the Zombie Queen and King last month, still in my suitcase. I’m looking forward to sitting down with it soon. Ahead of it on the reading queue? The End, the last of the Lemony Snicket books, and Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, bought at the Powell’s mothership in my new second-favorite city, Portland, OR. (Also bought at Powell’s: the awesome David Chinitz’s long-awaited T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, which does me the great honor of citing my paper on Eliot’s interest in, and criticism of, mystery fiction.)

As regular readers of my non-posting know, I’ve spent a lot of the past year traveling to do user research.

Part of what all that travel does to you — or, at least, to me — is make you value the specificity of your own local life all the more. At my coffee store, this past weekend, not only did the guy behind the counter know what I get and how often I generally come by (Vienna Roast, every other week), but he handed me a box of tissues as a way of gently telling me the cold was making my nose run.

But that also means you value the specificity of other people’s local lives, too. And so it was especially heartening, I think, to see the election results come out as clearly a national trend as they were. We’re different in a hundred thousand subtle and endlessly fascinating ways, but in the end, there are some things Americans can agree on, and that’s just got to give you hope.

Please check your e-mail.  Thank you.

Everyone else, please return to your regularly-scheduled Thursday, now in progress.

So, yeah, I haven’t been posting, but in my own defense, since I’ve posted I’ve been to Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Halifax, and a small city in rural Nova Scotia that will remain nameless for the anonymity of the research we did there.

I am almost, almost done with my travel for the year, but next week will take me to Chicago and Boston.  I have the weekend free in Chicago — Christine, Maggie, Heimbaugh?  Anyone up for the Field Museum and some beer?  (Non simultaneously, of course.)
As to the Boston trip, I might have either Wednesday or Thursday evening free, but I don’t know yet.  We fly home Friday night so the team that are going on to the second round of research can get a weekend at home before it starts.

So, today is the West Indian Day parade, which takes place down the major boulevard in my neighborhood and is generally one of the things I look forward to the most about the end of the summer. Today, though, I can’t go, as I’m about to head back out on the road for a week and a half. (Fear not, as my apartment is guarded by the superstitious paranoids next door and my robotic cat.)

Instead, I went down to Duane Reade to pick up some items to help me with a long flight in the middle of our government’s War On Moisture. (Towelettes, cough drops, the like). When I turned back up my block, a cop stopped me.

“Do you live on this street?” she asked.

“Yeah, I live here.” What was going on? I wondered. An accident?

“Can I see some ID?”

“No, I don’t have any with me. Why?”

“We’re only letting people who live on this street go through. What’s your address?”

I gave her the street number. “What street?” I repeated the name of the street we were on. “Cross streets?” I told her.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Extra security for the parade,” explained her partner. “We want to make sure no one’s walking through here with a bomb or anything.”

I just stared at him. “Extra security? I’ve been living here for seven years,” I said, “and I’ve never seen these streets get blocked off for the parade.” (Mind you, at this point we were a good five or six blocks from where the parade route goes.)

“Well, you know, 9/11?” he said sneeringly. “It changed things.”

I wanted to note that I hadn’t seen it change things in 2002-2005, inclusive, but I have a plane to catch for work and I really couldn’t risk getting picked up by the NYPD without ID on me and missing my flight. So I just said, “Look, I know you’re just doing your job, so I’m not gonna make an issue with you, but this is stupid,” and walked away as they laughed. There were no more blockades as I walked closer to the parade route.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are always a lot of cops on the street for the West Indian Day parade — there are a lot of people out, many of them drinking, and some crowd control is a good thing. But blocking off streets — and, again, these are streets within hearing distance of the parade but a good five-ten minute walk TO the parade — and saying that it’s “because of 9/11″? As I said to Terri, who used to live down the block, “of all the targets on al-Quaeda’s list, the West Indian Day parade is not one of them.”

All I can say, as I try to decide if it’s more worth it to me to wear my orthotics and not have foot pain or to put them in my bag and spare myself the five minute quiz at security about what I have in my shoes, is thank God the terrorists haven’t taken away our freedom, right?

Clive has posted a link to an interview about the whys and wherefores of his awesome blog Collision Detection, in which he discusses the ways the blog has made him, as a freelance journalist, a lot more findable for potential editors:

Google is the determiner of reality on-line and I know the way Google works. Blogs attract a lot of links; other bloggers link to you. You very quickly build up a huge amount of what’s called “Google Juice.” And sure enough, three months after I started the blog, with barely a couple dozen links pointing to me, I was already on the first page. Within a year, I was number one. Basically, I’m undislodgeable at this point in time.

Curious, I went and Googled just “Clive.” Our boy comes in at number five, just ahead of Clive Owen and well before Clive Cussler. More Clivey than Clive Owen! I’m so proud.