A song sung on a Sunday morning, toy cats — Siamese cat and Fireworksy Christianson, to be precise — in hand.
I broke the tab that “locks” the ethernet cable into a physical port. For some reason that made me curious about network cables in general. (First I searched for a coupler, imagining maybe I would add a second shorter cable onto this one, so that there would be a “lockable” cable that went into the computer. Then I realized that I didn’t know the difference between CAT5 and RJ-45, and then I wondered if the cable I am using now, which I got with a Kingston 10baseT hub over a decade ago, is capable of supporting the gigabit intranet we have here in the house. … Did you really want to know how I wander into some of these things?)
| Term | Explanation |
|---|---|
| CAT | Short for Computer And Telephone |
| CAT# | CAT1/2/3/4/5/5e/6 are cabling standards |
| RJ45 | the network connectors |
| RJ11 | the phone connectors |
There you have it.
I’m lucky to have a number of people in my life who are incredibly supportive of the work I do. One of them happens to be my sister-in-law, who sent us a bag of Raven’s Brew Gourmet Coffee called “Wicked Wolf” which had the slogan “Grandma’s Gone but the Coffee’s On” emblazoned across the bottom of the front of the bag:
The blurb on the back begins: “Got big eyes, big ears, big teeth? Are you cross-dressing?”
It’s really good coffee, too. And I say that as someone from South Louisiana who has drank his fair share of “gourmet” coffees and/or “strong” coffees that were really nothing more than burnt. I don’t know what the folks at Raven’s Brew do, but somehow they get a strong, bold taste which really does have some fruit in it — I know, I know: I sound like a wine aficianado — or a coffee aficianado, I guess — but in the case of this coffee, it’s true, I tell you! (I would gladly accept any of their coffees as gifts. If it was available on Amazon, I’d already have it ordered by now. As it is, I’m already doing comparison shopping in my head to see how much I have to buy to justify the shipping cost.)
Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View can be enabled by opening a Terminal window and typing the following:
defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YESMacworld has a review of three iPhone apps that allow you to work with your Flickr account. I don’t see anything that transforms my current workflow, but it’s nice to know they are there. Here’s the review.
A number of my pre- and post-Workshop 1 essays are on the blog. Links are below. I also promised everyone that I would post a version of the 4/6 presentation I gave. It’s here, but I’ll warn you now that it is only the slides. I am working on a transcript as well as a “slide-cast” version. (I’ll post an update as soon as possible.) There are three options when it comes to the blog: scan the main page or click on the individual links below. For all Project Bamboo posts, anywhere on the site, you can simply click on the “projectbamboo” tag, which can also be found in the right-hand navigation bar. UPDATE: The slidecast version of the talk is now ready for download. It’s 8.7MB, so you’re best downloading it with either a fast connection or a nice cup of coffee. (With any luck, both.) The first thing I posted was “[Some Ideas I’m Taking with me to Chicago][ids].” It collects together some projects I have either started or imagined in the last few years that an improved information infrastructure for the humanities would, I believe, make more possible. In the post titled “[Pre-Workshop Notes][pwn]” I offer a synthesis of a wide ranging conversation that Clai Rice and I had one afternoon which focused on what we imagined were some of [our central concerns][pwn]. * In the next post, I did my assigned homework, where I outlined a scholarly practice that I regularly engage in and that I also feared might be somewhat overlooked.
Digital Humanities Sites
Those folks at the Mellon Foundation are a busy lot. Apparently they have funded a seminar at UCLA on the digital humanities. The manifesto that the seminar has produced/is producing currently runs 20 paragraphs, with an additional 4 paragraphs that have “REMARKS ON THE FINITUDE OF DISCIPLINES.” They offer up a new departmental regime for the humanities:
- Department of Print Media Studies: Replacing literature departments, the purpose of this department is to study the materiality of texts, constructions of authorship, linguistic forms, the history of the book and book publication, antecedents to and descendents of print, as well as the relationships and tensions between print culture and digital culture.
- Department of Discourse Analyses: The purpose of this department is to study the history of the triangulation of knowledge/discourse/power, paying particular attention to discursive structures, knowledge making, and the specific media forms in which knowledge is produced, disseminated, encountered, and valued.
- Department of Comparative Media Studies: The purpose of this department is to study sonic, visual, tactile, and immersive media through a comparative framework. This department replaces the division of humanities departments by media form (departments of art history, musicology, film, etc).
- Department of Digital Cultural Mapping: The purpose of this department is to examine the junctions between space/time, information, and culture. It brings geographic analyses together with historical methods, visual analysis, and the presentation of knowledge. It also examines the cultural and social impact of digital mapping technologies and the significance of these mapping technologies for understanding cultural phenomena.
- Department of Cultural Analytics: The purpose of this department is to bring quantitative analyses from the math and sciences together with large-scale, complex social and cultural datasets.
As is usual with many of these humanities manifestos — it’s certainly present in some of the Project Bamboo discussions — there is interlarded in these various assumptions that the humanities only study in detail the realms of arts and literature. Ordinary humans seem consigned, in this particular matrix, to only be worth examining as part of a large dataset. So much for my own interests in material folk culture and folklife. Cultural anthropology, too, would seem to be outta here.
I’ve been thinking about the future of scholarly publishing rather intensely for the past year or so. Before then, I was simply an individual scholar pursuing my own career, trying to make the best of not only a changing landscape (in terms of what remains print and what goes digital) but also a bewildering interdisciplinary landscape — a humanist who studies material culture that isn’t conventionally artwork has to search a lot of niches.
I got more involved in the future of scholarly publishing, which is a phrase I’m going to stick with for the time being, when I was asked to sit on the Publications Committee of the American Folklore Society. My participation in that group led to the development of a plan for a new website (set to “go live” on May 1) of which I now find myself editor. Since then I have become my university’s liaison to Project Bamboo, a Mellon Foundation initiative to develop a digital infrastructure for humanities research.
So I’ve spent a fair amount of thinking about scholarly publishing from an institutional perspective, but now I want to re-turn the tables and think again from an individual perspective. My thinking really began with a simple forecast — and one I should be sure to emphasize that is only my own and does not in any way reflect the American Folklore Society or my own position as editor of the new site: that the Journal of American Folklore will one day simply be absorbed into the larger communications platform that the Society maintains.
How did I arrive at that forecast? I imagined the publication/communication landscape of the future from the point of view of an individual scholar. From the point of the view of the individual practitioner — we’ll leave groups for another time — there are three obvious places where one’s work should be featured:
- A personal site
- An employer’s site
- A professional organization’s site
Or, to concretize things a bit. There are three places an interested reader should be able to go to find my work:
-
my personal site (
http://johnlaudun.org/) -
my university faculty page (
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jjl5766/), which should have a human-readable address like this:http://louisiana.edu/faculty/jlaudun -
Or my member page of my professional organization (
http://americanfolkloresociety/members/johnlaudun) — that link is only to the current AFS website, which doesn’t have anything like what I’m writing about here.
Publishing, or cross-linking, to those three pages should be a central part of my work-flow as a scholar. Two of those three allow for green sources and the third for gold.
We watched Helvetica today in the documentary seminar, and though the 80-minute film overflowed are 75-minute class, everyone had interesting comments to make:
- For one, how reliant type designers and graphic designers are on metaphors and metaphorical language to describe either type faces themselves or their use in various applications.
- How even a topic as seemingly “off the wall” as a type face could be handled readily by following established documentary film guidelines. That is, the film is fairly conventional in form: it alternates talking head interviews, sometimes in situ but sometimes in a kind of abstract visual space, with images of Helvetica out in the world. This is about as traditional as you can get. (Is there a kind of reverse relationship here: do more traditional documentary subjects allow for more non-traditional forms? Would pursuing non-traditional form and content simply push things too far for viewers? What would be an example of such a latter case?)
- What made the documentary so compelling was the passion, and articulateness, with which the designers spoke. Their language, their vision, brought us into their world and then back into our own.
After the film was over, we were all drawn to comment on how we now wanted to “go see for ourselves” instances of Helvetica in our own lives. I suggested that we do it by posting things to Flickr and perhaps tagging those images with “helvetica.” Guess what? As of today on Flickr, there are 8855 images tagged with “helvetica”. And so I am going to suggest that we create a group on Flickr and this is just one of a number of things we will post there before the semester is done.
TechDirt has an interesting write-up and commentary about a recent Brookings Institution conference on software patents. The writer suggests the real problem is that the members of the different fields present — lawyers on the one hand and economists and technologists on the other — simply have very different experiences, and thus understandings, of the nature of the work and of the problems associated with it. One commenter to the write-up pointed out that a fourth field, businesses that pay for software to be developed, is implied and that it probably falls in line with the lawyers.
I have yet to make my way through Zizek’s Parallax View, but I suspect that it’s describing a similar phenomenon.