Academic / Online: All the links that don't work in print

Hello, readers! On March 4, I visited the College of Arts at the University of Guelph, and gave a talk on the topic of "Academic/Online" in their Digital Humanities series. Many thanks to Kathy Hanneson for inviting me!

During that talk I referenced a lot of web sites, and showed them, too, but I thought having a page with all the links might be useful. This is that page..

In the talk, I argued that to be “academic/online” is to push advances across two different fronts.

1. You need to develop and cultivate a persona that you send into the Internet to act on your behalf in all your scholarly travels. It has to represent you accurately and effectively. And also, we can hope, efficiently. So we’ll talk about that, about being an academic online, in the noun sense (“I am an academic, who has a presence online”). 
2. Moving beyond the individual, we will also consider what it means to move the academic online, in the adjective sense (“Let’s get my academic research out there, on the intertubes!”). Academic/online in this sense can encompass everything from whole libraries moving online, to workshops or conferences maintaining a hashtag backchannel or putting abstracts online, to new forms of hybrid publication blending the heft of peer review with the utility of online distribution. 

The introductory and concluding portions of the talk did the analytic work: considering the bigger picture implications of these shifts in practice and what they mean for the future of academic work in both idealistic and pragmatic ways. This material is not included here--here it's just links to all the great examples of academic/online that I discussed.

An Academic Online

My own personal footprint as an individual academic / online:

• My Twitter, @digiwonk
• My group blog, Hook & Eye
• My graduate class blog, New Media Genres
• My delicious bookmarks, @digiwonk
• My Zotero group database for Deciphering Digital Life Writing
• My solo blog, that you're reading right now
• My Academia.edu profile, that I should use more, per Jessica Vitak's recent interview.

Here's two blog posts by Rohan Maitzen, that I mentioned, which defend blogging as a curiosity-driven intellectual practice and link this to real world practices of dabbling and discovering, or not:

• Blogging and Intellectual Curiosity
• Intellectual Curiosity: True Confessions Edition

Here's a ProfHacker post by Ryan Cordell I didn't mention, but I should have, on becoming an academic/online--this post links out to many great resources online:

• Creating and Maintaining a Professional Presence Online: A Roundup and Reflection

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The Academic Online

Academic Projects Online

I opened with the example of the multi-pronged project online that is the Quilt Alliance and all its various permutations in different communities and contexts. Here's a sampler, if you will pardon the pun:

• Quilt Alliance home page
• Great Lakes Quilt Centre at the Michigan State University Museum
• Quilt Alliance on Facebook
• Quilt Alliance on Twitter

These are the academic-based research projects I referenced in the talk:

• Active History
• INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments
• Emerging Modernisms: A Digital Modernism Collective
• EMIC: Editing Modernism in Canada

Academic Publishing Online

Here are some links related to online journals that look more like journals, and less like online :-)

• Canadian Journal of Disability Studies
• Public Knowledge Project / Open Journal Systems

Here are some new kinds and ways of periodical publishing on the web:

• PressForward: "Scholarship and Publication, the Web Way"
• Digital Humanities Now 
• Journal of Digital Humanities

How about books? These are going online in new ways, too.

• The Social Media Reader, somehow locked at Project Muse
• The Social Media Reader, perfectly legal PDF on the web
• Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom, note Creative Commons license and Princeton imprimatur
• Short Guide to Digital Humanities as a web-friendly book excerpt of
• Digital Humanities, available for free from MIT P, but with the standard no-copy disclaimer?
• Digital Literary Studies: An Evolving Anthology at MLA Commons

New media studies and self disclosure: some questions

Something I’ve noticed from my first New Media Genres graduate seminar this year: in the class introductions there was an abundance of really personal information—informal, private, embarrassing. There were identity disclosures related to sexuality. There were confessions. There were fans. There were passionate doubters. Some polemicizing. I made a joke about how everyone really needed group therapy more than a graduate seminar.

But the joke reveals something important, I think – just like when Linda Warley and I were teaching the Writing the Self Online graduate course, I discover that (like studying auto/biography) studying new media, because it involves using / doing / creating new media both produces passion as a byproduct of research, and then compels the disclosure of this passion in the work. Mommy blogs. Antonio Banderas fan fiction. Pottermore. Anti-Twilight memes. Gay dating / hookup sites. Bikini photos and Google searches that never go away. Due South. LOLcats. Food porn.

Are researchers in a/b studies a little prone to incorporating their own a/b into their work? Yup. It’s probably because they are hyper-aware of the grounding of most narratives in the self, and the grounding of the self, provisionally always, in shifting and competiting narratives, overlapping with and constituting our shared histories. I have noticed that work in this field often blends the practice of life writing with the theorizing of same.

Are researchers in new media studies a little prone to informality, shorthand, fannish expression, multimodal communication practices? And do they root a lot of their work in their own experiences and thus seem to write a lot about themselves? Yeah. It's true in my own work on personal mommy blogging for example--and the piece I've linked, tellingly, found its home in the journal Biography.

Is this a bug, or is it a feature?

I mean, when suchlike happens in a literary classroom it is called the Oprah’s Book Club problem: I don’t care if this novel brought up some long-simmering issue from your childhood and you couldn’t bring yourself to read the ending because the middle made you cry for three days. We may want to study the means by which emotional reactions are brought about. We may want to study some audience effects on a larger scale (Janice Radway and the reading of Reading the Romance) but mostly, that audience is not understood to be the critic doing the critiquing. Identity politics is for cultural studies, not usually for literary reading. (I’m exaggerating, but this is by and large conventional, if not everywhere or in all circumstances or niche endeavours.)

So new media researchers housed in English may well be at some kind of disadvantage because they have to be so personal and so Oprah’s-Book-Club in their own work: it breaches disciplinary standards of critical distance, the focus on form. This is again similar to some of the difficulties faced by auto/biography scholars, at least historically: there is assumed to be no art in the recitation of the facts of a life—nothing to interpret, and so no fit focus for a real academic.

It seems we cannot study new objects—new media, auto/biography writ broad—without fundamentally altering scholarly practices in English (and perhaps elsewhere), challenging values. Even if someone is rooted firmly in the prior art (getting a PhD in English, examining standard literary materials [what a funny, telling locution!]) a serious move into new objects of study seems to inevitably entail a radical shift in perspective, in practice. We are moving from new criticism and its sole focus on the text, to all the flavours of post structuralism and theory that focused on structural questions and power, to ... what has been termed participant ethnography and from there a squishier kind of content analysis based on our own expertise in the "communities" whose texts we are examining?

That’s research--but what about my class? As for how the classroom changes, it seems to me that like in the theory wars (and the focus on race/class/gender and the move toward cultural studies) teachers and students are a lot more exposed as thinking, feeling, variously-positioned subjects. This makes us all vulnerable, and may call for a new kind of teaching practice, a sensitivity and a willingness to make a safe space, somehow.

DH Grad Students! What Do You Want?

Seriously now, tell me. I'm currently a Member at Large on the executive of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, and I've decided to do some work to help grad students.

I'm not, actually, a grad student, and I haven't been since, err, 2004. But I was a grad student in Digital Humanities (or "Humanities Computing" as we used to call it when I was a youngster) from 1997-2004, over two degrees and in two universities. From the wonderful, invigorating panel discussion on graduate issues in DH at last year's Congress in Waterloo, I learned that ... much has changed since my time, but also, depressingly, other things have not changed at all.

Some issues I discern:

• Alt-ac: is it really a thing? A desirable thing? How to plan for this career path? How to advocate for this work as "alternatively academic" rather than "alternative to academic"?
• Dissertations: Should dissertation or completion requirements devised, in my discipline, for literature students investigating their ideas in prose be the same ones we use to assess or train digital humanists? What is the role of the built object in capstone work for DH PhDs? How about programming? Or soldering? 
• Double-disciplining: It is still true that digital humanists, particularly students, have to do twice the work for half the credit--not just in the dissertation, but in everything. We are expected to have full knowledge of the primary discipline that house and credentials us, as well as full knowledge of the emerging canon of thinking and range of practice of DH.
• Can you fix my printer / build the department website / manage our Facebook page / explain the cloud to the department? Even DHers hired into academic positions may find themselves being asked to do kinds and numbers of tasks other professors or students are not asked to do.
• RA work: how is being a research assistant in DH different from standard RA positions? Are there some best practices here? How to explain to others the value or scope of this work, and the skills unique to these positions? (Like project managment, collaboration, technical work, etc.)
• Unreasonable job ads: "Department of Something seeks expert in Medieval Whatsit, an expertise in composition theory, and a funded multimillion dollar research project in DH." Many hiring departments do not seem to know quite how to hire a DHer into the tenure track, and what it is reasonable to expect. Needs some advocacy?
• Access to research equipment, datasets, etc. This work often requires high-power tech, beyond the index cards (or Scrivener) that other humanist grad students need to get their work done. How to fund this?
• Training: Nuff said.
• Grad programs in DH: what should these look like? Are they a good idea? In what ways and for whom?

What do YOU think needs addressing. And how can I (and by extension, CSDH) help?

Drop some comments; tweet this and share with your network; beat the bushes from some ideas and some interested parties.

Give it your best shot, and I'll give it mine.

Whither teh typo? Damn you, Lion autocorrect!

I just upgraded the operating system on my MacBook Pro from Snow Leopard to Lion. Immediately, I notice some big changes. My first reaction is that my computer has got a lot ... faster. Next, I am completely discombobulated by the reversal of the scrolling interface: instead of the direction of my swiping fingers matching the direction of the scroll bar, the new "natural" scrolling works like on my iPad and my iPhone, which is to say it mimics the direction of the content.

Yeah. I turned that off for a couple of days until I felt better able to cope.

The most serious change, unexpectedly, is Lion's vaunted cross-everything autocorrect. I'm not sure I like it. Because it takes my typos and turns them into something new and different.

I like when "teh" gets autocorrected to "the." Not so much, though, when "shit" becomes "shot" or "loooooooveyou" turns into "lollygagging" or "effect" into "effete." As we all know, autocorrect makes some hilarious mistakes, viz http://damnyouautocorrect.com. This is super annoying on the phone, where undoing the auto-'corrections' interrupts the flow of thinking and is in any case sometimes nearly impossible to alter. And between my clumsy thumbs typing things incorrectly, and autocorrect further mangling my intentions? Comes my all-purpose apology / sigfile: "Sent from my iPhone."

"Sent from my iPhone" is my catchall excuse for mangled typing--it's not, I'm trying to tell my readers through this sigfile, that my thinking or my spelling are wrong, it's that my damn thumbs and this damn software just can't capture it very well in a timely fashion.

I always forgive people the weirdness of their "Sent from my iPhone" emails, the same way I cut slack to unintentionally illiterate text messages: people are communicating under suboptimal conditions and I adjust my expectations around grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and flair accordingly.

The problem for me, now, is that autocorrect has jumped from just mangling my text messages and brief emails, to mangling my everything: blog posts, real emails, comments on blogs, and all the rest of it. And with no "Sent from my iPhone" sigfile excusing the strange diction that can sometimes result, I feel weirdly exposed: my understandable occasional typo online turns into inexcusable lapses in vocabulary, sense, spelling with the intrusion of this new "feature."

I find I have to bring a new and different kind of vigilance to my writing online from my main computer now: I used to scan briefly for typos before posting a comment on a blog for example, but now I'm a lot more careful to make sure an autocorrect howler hasn't distorted my meaning in a way that makes me look potentially wackadoo to non-Lion users.

So the upshot? Lion has called an end to the innocent typographical error, and replaced it, I think, with the more insidious semantic errors introduced by an autocorrect that's almost always less smart than the writer it's scolding.

We'll all get used to this in a couple of months, I imagine: we always do. But it's interesting for me to think about the social norms around correctness and errors in online communication, social norms that were maybe not 100% explicitly clear to me until Lion went and disrupted it all.

What makes a great conference?

I'm not yet home from Theorizing the Web 2011, just sitting in the Starbucks at the Marriott wondering what it is that made this conference so awesome. Because it was awesome: I ran out of paper in my notebook from writing so much down.

I'm thinking it's the grad students.

I go to a lot of conferences and, if I may be frank, was rapidly becoming disenchanted, nay, jaded, about the whole system.

What makes me jaded about conferences:

- The panels are unfocused, so usually there's only one paper of the three--or, god help me, four--that I actually want to see
- There are way, way too many concurrent panels, so that the conference has 400 people at it, but each session has 4 people presenting to 7 other people
- The panels start and finish late, throwing off my eating / peeing / time management
- The papers run overtime
- The speakers read excerpts from an article, so it's too dense and too long, and hard to decipher
- The speakers have prepared their presentations on the plane, and it shows
- The panel chair won't actually stop papers that run too long, so at the end, there's no time at all for questions
- There's never enough break time to actually talk to people and network
- There's no food, so when there are breaks, everyone scatters to the wind: no time to actually talk to people and network
- Sometimes, people won't talk to you if they don't already know you
- Often, people skip out on vast chunks of the conference to do the meeting and networking they otherwise have no time for

What was awesome about TTW2011

- The panels were very focused
- People actually attended panels, and the keynotes, for the whole day. My paper was in the last session of the day, right before the keynote, at 5pm, and there were 40 people attending.
- All the panel rooms were in one hallway, leading to group cohesion and chance conversations
- It was one day long.
- People were very friendly: I suspect this might be because of Twitter, which breaks the ice. If we follow each other online, I'm more likely to walk up and introduce myself, because you've already indicated some sort of interest in my acquaintance, or my work.
- There was food in the morning, and food at night. And a party with a live band and beer in Rubbermaid-bucket coolers.
- Most importantly, perhaps: people put a lot of effort into their presentations, with the result that they were professional, and clear, and on point. Some even managed *funny*.

I am impressed at the level of smarts, research, and preparation of all the talks I went to. Did some people learn the hard way that 42 slides take more than 15 minutes to discuss? Probably. But the slides were really, really good, so I assume that's a rookie mistake of over-ambition, which I'm kinda inclined to forgive readily.

(It's very easy for me to tell other people they went overtime: we only had two speakers on my panel, so co-panelist and I had the luxury of 25-30 minute presentations, with still lots of time for questions--and what great questions!)

So. The upshot is this: I'm going to go to more conferences where graduate students predominate on the program. In new media studies, where something new in the tech or theory or cultural realm pops up on the radar almost faster than the speed of scholarship, it makes sense already to see what the kids are up to. Beyond that, though, I think grad students just put more effort into their papers. As a result, they present better work that's more valuable to me in my own research, and that's the point, right?

Professors, do you think we can step up our game?

Deciphering Digital Life Writing

My project on Deciphering Digital Life Writing just received funding from the Standard Research Grant program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). I'm going to track my progress on the research here on this blog; as some of you have expressed an interest in what the project is about, I'm posting the Summary of Proposed Research, from the grant application, below.

The summary is meant to briefly describe the gist of the project, for a non-expert audience. I'd love your feedback on potential directions or sources you think might be relevant. Thanks!

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Deciphering Digital Life Writing

Widespread popular use of “web 2.0” (O’Reilly) technologies has produced—even required—a proliferation of autobiographical self-representation in online venues such as blogs, personal home pages, social networks, dating websites, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Online banking services ask you to provide the name of your first pet; a dating website asks you to detail your height; photo-sharing websites want to map all the locations you photograph in, and link this information to your user profile. In this research project I decipher how and why individuals use Internet media platforms to fashion representations of themselves; how the affordances (Norman) of digital technologies enable and constrain, compel or restrict, these self-representations; and what impact the resulting autobiographical texts have in the larger context of users’ relationships online and off. That is, this project provides detailed and comprehensive answers to questions about why so many people provide so many details of their lives—photos, memories, feelings, desires, ancestry, and more—to an anonymous audience of strangers online, and how these strangers become communities, questions that animate most popular discourses addressing the social web.

This will be the first monograph-length study of “digital life writing” (Warley) that studies a full range of digital genres, all of which focus on individual, personal self-representation, in both established and emerging platforms. While existing book-length studies have considered the general question of what identity means in “the age of the Internet,” and while research articles have frequently focused on specific communities’ uses of particular digital genres such as Facebook or blogs, this study is unique in its comprehensiveness and its methodology. Aiming to avoid the obsolescence that rapidly befalls research focussing narrowly on one particular technology, this project begins always from the more fundamental but essential human questions of “Why do people do this?” and “How do social media support those purposes?” rather than the more technologically-inflected “What does Facebook mean?” or “How will location-based social networks impact personal privacy?” This study, then, focusses first and foremost on the “social exigence” (Miller) of the communicative act, employing surveys, literary close reading, and broad text sampling to understand digital life writing as a social practice rather than a purely technical one. Further, the project attends to the particular rhetorical strategies that underlie the composition of social media texts—returning a notion of deliberate personal authorship instead of the anonymous, massed “wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki)—while simultaneously accounting for the multiple media that undergird, support, and inflect these writings. In this way, the project will develop a robust, generalizable methodology for addressing social media of the present as well as the future.

This research thus brings together rhetorical genre theory, new media theory, computer-mediated communications (CMC) research, and autobiography studies, to propose a new theory of life writing as practiced online as well as a new, generalizable methodology of multimedia-aware close reading to undergird continuing work in the study of writing in ever-shifting online genres in an era of rapid technological change. This project offers the first systematic response to that call and aims to develop new methodological and theoretical frameworks to address these new kinds of texts.

Welcome, Internets

Here's an experiment in being a professor in public.

I'm going to try (like so many of you) to share my research and ideas in real time in this space, and to take part in the lively conversation I've enjoyed so much in my readings in the blogosphere. I'm also going to try to make my teaching more public here, too. I'll be posting my syllabi, and carrying on some of the teaching work of my courses in digital media in this space.

This semester, I'm teaching two courses. One is a graduate seminar in the University of Waterloo English Department's new Master's program in Experimental Digital Media (XDM). That one is English 780: New Media Genres. The other class is a new first year course, English 108D: Digital Lives, in support of a new undergraduate specialisation in Digital Media Studies.

This semester, I'm also beginning work on a revision of the Little Brown Compact Handbook (Canadian edition). This new project for me builds on the prior American and Canadian editions very ably prepared by Jane Aaron and by Murray McArthur, and my contributions are going to center, in this edition, on revamping the Research and Writing sections of the book to account for the new practices and resources of the digital age.

I look forward to getting some ideas and feedback here!

If you like, you can follow me on Twitter @digiwonk, or read what's happening at the other place I blog at, Hook and Eye.