daelnorwood

Link Round-Up

Lightning-Quick Linkfest of Laffs

March 2, 2010March 2, 2010 daelnorwood

Or, Finally Clearing Out the ‘Ole Folder

Some things you might have missed:

The Myth of Black Confederates Twofer: How Best to Respond to the Black Confederate Narrative and Falsifying Civil War Photographs: How They Do It (h/t Cliopatria).

On the subject of lies, and the lying liars who tell them: what about students? DIY Plagiarism Detection Software (hint: it uses teh Googles) (h/t to ProfHacker).

Obscura Day! Visit weird, fun places near you, on March 20th (h/t Boing Boing).

Stand up for your e-Reader Rights. I can’t stress how important this is to scholars and teachers alike.

Charles Stross on Everything You Thought Ever Wanted to Know about Commercial Publishing, But Were Too Stupid To Ask: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: its uses, and the ethics of using it.

Fresh from its battle with Amazon, Macmillan blows my mind: “Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally”. Who knew a publishing company could have a not-terrible idea?

And last but certainly not least, possibly the most perfect blog post ever: John Holbo, “The Wizard of Oz,” Crooked Timber, 18 Feb 2010.

Image cite: kfkirsch1, “Lasso of Light,” Flickr, CC License

Things I Want To Say in My Dissertation But Can’t

February 26, 2010February 26, 2010 daelnorwood

Or, But Damned If I don’t put it in a presentation

“When antebellum Southerners talked about China, it was their way of thinking back and lying about England.”

That is all.

Jschneid, “Reclining Nude,” Flickr, CC License

History and Historians, Ivory Towers

Enthusiasm, Not Acrimony

February 23, 2010February 23, 2010 daelnorwood

Or, Thoughts?

Tony Grafton’s recent review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas has caused a bit of a stir among the lumpen intelligensia, or at least it has within my very small circle of it.

While I can’t count myself among Prof. Grafton’s detractors — I found his takedown of Menand’s narrow and vapid pendantry useful, and if it was a bit florid in it’s defense of humanistic knowledge, well, then I’m more than ready to excuse a bit of overwrought prose and unfortunately romantic metaphor by a historian who has done so much to put the profession’s decline (as a job) in the limelight — I do certainly feel the frustration that accompanies incredibly limited job prospects.

Wasting years of one’s life in the pursuit of something no one values has a way of leaving a bitter taste, I suppose.

The several discussions I’ve had about Prof. Grafton’s piece, both on- and off-line — notable only in the lack of good-will, candor, and valid information coming from all sides — seem to bear that bitterness out. My hope is that with this post we might begin a new conversation, something more productive than the foaming wrath that Grafton’s and Menand’s overperformed erudition seem to have elicited.

That is, I want to talk about concrete resources for figuring out how to do something else beyond these damn three-letter degrees in futility, maybe even in a line of work with less pathological tendencies.

So, three sites to start us off:

Alexandra Lord and Julie Taddeo appear to have abandoned Beyond Academe, but it’s still offers some good primers.

Mark Johnson’s Sellout is of similar vintage, but with much more (and better organized) content; focuses on what humanities PhDs in general can do beyond the seminar room.

Finally, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes’s In the Service of Clio, updated regularly, offers non-depressing first-person profiles of historians working outside of universities.

I would also link to the Chronicle’s pieces on this topic, but as we all know, that newspaper is frakking depression itself.

That’s just a start. It’s a big internet, and all suggestions are welcome.

However, further commentary on Grafton, Menand, the horribleness of grad programs and/or humanities fields in general, etc will be immediately deleted.

Tyleringram, “Cute anyone?” Flickr, CC License

Uncategorized

Declaring A Power Ballad

February 16, 2010 daelnorwood

Or, One Republic Indeed

feat. Timbaland

This stuff really never gets old. Love it. h/t

Uncategorized

One Out of Three Ain’t Bad (News)

February 12, 2010 daelnorwood

Or, Friday Fun Times

One scientist drowned and another was eaten by hyenas
Serena Golden, “‘The Warcraft Civilization,’” IHE, 12 Feb 2010

An interview with sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, about his new book on, yes, WoW. Very smart stuff:

Q: You also argue that virtual worlds merit attention as an area of study in themselves – and of course The Warcraft Civilization represents a step in that very direction. Why should we study virtual worlds, and what might we hope to learn?

A: Many reasons, but here are mine. Each well-designed virtual world is based on a coherent theory of human society, history, and our options for the future. Thus, this is like an entirely new field of literature or a laboratory that develops and tests social theories with actual human beings, somewhere between philosophy and social science but also with utopian qualities. For example: Pirates of the Burning Sea is set in the Caribbean in 1720 and reflects a general view of society often called political economy. A Tale in the Desert, set in a kind of utopian ancient Egypt, illustrates principles of industrial supply chains, and fits theories of technology as ritual originally proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Star Trek Online (which opened only two days ago) is based on the cultural relativist principle “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” Tabula Rasa expressed a well-developed ideology of space exploration, and our avatars were actually taken up to the International Space Station. Of course The Matrix Online was built on European theories of false consciousness. In the 1960s I started studying utopian communes and relgious movements, because I saw them as valid if risky experiments on new directions for humanity. That’s what virtual worlds are today.

An iPad is a glorified web kiosk.
David Parry, “The iPad and Higher Education,” ProfHacker, 8 Feb 2010

Aka, Good reasons to loathe the iPad, Apple, etc. Relevant excerpts:

For me, this is the real crux of the matter with the iPad: it is designed as a beautiful, wonderful, easy to use media consumption device. But I don’t want my students to be only media consumers. To be successful engaged citizens with control over their own life path, they need to be critical consumers and creators of media, not passive consumers. This device is designed for passive consumption.
…

But let’s be clear: these are locked devices… educational appliances, not educational computers. …what makes them revolutionary is that they are in fact a step backwards from the way that the web has operated.

And finally, for all those new profs, old profs, and wanna-profs
Thomas H. Benton, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’,” CofHE, 8 Feb 2010

A humanist from the Chron of Higher Ed keeps it real. This one goes out to all my colleagues who believe what their teachers tell them:

If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

Image cite: slayerphoto, “Venus flytrap,” Flickr, CC License