The Yonderist – Page 5 – All those who wander are not lost.

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded a trial copy of the latest version of Filemaker Pro — there is no plain Filemaker version, so I don’t know why they keep the “Pro” distinction — to work with the Project Bamboo scholarly narrative corpus. It came in handy and actually helped me discern a few patterns that I intuited but could not grasp readily. (See my previous post on One Digital Difference for more.)

I went on to create two more databases with the app: one to contain my vita, which struck me as a better way to build a complex document, and one in which to keep research notes. I built the vita database both as a way to build my database skills but also because one gets so many requests for a vita, but often with particular information highlighted or, in some cases, with only certain information provided.

For example, I regularly get asked to participate in grants written for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, which only wants two-page vitas. I am going up for graduate faculty review this year, and they only want to see the last five years of activity, and they prefer to see peer-reviewed activities highlighted.

Now, I can do that by hand in a document or I can let a database build the document from scratch for me. Hmmmm … which will I choose?

But Filemaker is not cheap. I had asked the College to purchase it for me, but as anyone in Louisiana Higher Education knows, there is no money. (And, it turns out, there will be no money for many years to come.) I can cry about it, or I can suck it up and regard Filemaker as an investment not only in saving my time in the future, but also in my intellectual/professional development. (And one with less cognitive overhead, and chances of cognitive overload, than my forays into teaching myself programming — I will learn how to code one day!

So, here are prices for Filemaker Pro:

The Academic Superstore has it for $184.95. (I am not sure what the shipping charges, if any, will be.)
Amazon.com has the full version for $269.99. (I would go for the upgrade version, but I’m not sure that I have a qualifying upgrade product and some of the comments lead me to believe that this is more complicated than I care to explore.)
The Apple Education Store has it for $179.95 with free shipping, but they will charge me sales tax of $14.37.

Ugh. What I wouldn’t give for my university to have a really cool bookstore that negotiated great prices for faculty, students, and staff. In an ideal world, this wouldn’t be this hard, and this expensive.

My Schedule at the American Folklore Society Meeting

2009-08-03

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The final draft of the program for the 2009 meeting of the American Folklore Society came out last week and a quick search revealed here’s where I’m going to be:

On Thursday from 1:30 – 3:30, I will be in the panel “Watery Places” to present my paper “The Ethics of Creativity on the Rice Prairies of Louisiana;
On Friday from 1:30 – 3:30, I will be in the panel “The Future of Communication in Folklore III: New Media” with old friends Jason Jackson, Jon Kay, and Tom Mould; and, finally,
Just after the previous session, I will be in the “Meet the Editors” panel with Harry Berger and Giovanna P. del Negro and the super-secret new editor(s) of the Journal of American Folklore.

The Cult of Done Works for Me

2009-07-31

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The analysis of the Project Bamboo scholarly narratives is done and uploaded to the IEEE Conference website — it’s really nice (the website; the paper I leave to others to judge). I’ll post more about the paper in a moment. In the mean time, the poster and the explanation tell you all you need to know about the The Cult of Done.

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.

The Difference Digital Makes

2009-07-29

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This is my own response to the current discussion being held by the Digital Humanities On-line Seminar:

It strikes me that both the ongoing discussion about what difference digital makes and McCarty’s wonderment about Grafton and company really are two facets of the same jewel at which we all seem to keep staring, mistaking it, if I may continue the metaphor for just a moment more, for the light which it refracts. (I’m going to return to this Gothic moment later.)

The point of reading, it seems to me, is to engage in better and more diverse kinds of dialogue. Wisdom does not flow from books, but from conversations between people. Perhaps this reveals my own deep indebtedness to philosophers like Karl Jaspers but such an idea is found in folk philosophies around the world. (E.g., the rural Irish concern for the man who keeps too much to himself.)

Here, digital does make a difference, even if only that difference is, as other posters have noted, once of making things happen more readily. Still, the chance conversation between the scholar and the ordinary citizen is much more likely to happen in a place where both can be, if not simultaneously, at least in a deferred fashion. For this, I look no further than my own research with rice farmers and meta shop workers who regularly check my blog and my Flickr account to see what I’ve been up to and to wonder why I forgot to interview so-and-so. (I really should.)

In turn, they submit to me, and to others, there own photographs and videos from their own archives, greatly expanding the historical record as they do so.

I am fairly certain that many, many of us share this active difference that the digital makes possible — and by active difference I mean an orientation by action. Some of this is born out by the analysis that I am currently doing looking at the narratives collected by Project Bamboo from a variety of scholars sprinkled across the nation. So far, the common themes are really things people want to be able to do: access, search, digitize, manage, collaborate, preserve, compute. (It’s interesting that compute really amounts to the smallest percentage of actions people wish to perform.) They want all these actions to be pervaded by two properties: annotated (metadata) and authentic (authorized).

What’s interesting about these actions is that under “collaborate” a number of the narratives/scenarios are really about opening up the scholarly convention not only to students but also to just regular people, who have their own ideas and practices. (And, to answer from a folklorist’s perspective an earlier conversation about is a prototype a theory? Yes, from my own experience as a field researcher, most folks do not have theories about why they do what they do. They don’t need to. It’s embedded in the doing. It can be drawn out to some degree, but not directly.)

So I don’t mind if the book dematerializes. Let it go. The codex is a particular manifestation of a much longer-lived idea: that marks in the physical can lead to conversations that lead to ideas. (And, yes, this probably resembles Heideegger’s sense of “aletheia,” but I did warn you with a reference to Jaspers up front where this note was headed.)

All of this reminds me of the construction binge our good Abbott Suger kicked off and put a whole lot of masons to work, all of whom had competing senses of what the right proportions were. The legacy of the ideas they carried in their head can be glimpsed in the architectural mess that is Chartres, among other cathedrals. The advantage we now enjoy is that many of those same workers carry smartphones and regularly check e-mail and our blog pages, if we but invite them.

Ooo, I want a desk like this

2009-07-24

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Why I Do What I Do

2009-07-22

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Early in The Writing Life Annie Dillard tells the story of an aspiring writer coming up to her after a reading and asking if she, too, could become a writer. That she really wanted to. In the moment, Dillard tells us she remembered a similar question once being posed to a painter and that his response was “Do you like the smell of paint?” Her response is “do you like to make sentences?”

The nature of the response is to point out that we too often focus on the role or persona and not on the process or product. Painters paint. Writers write. It’s a stupidly simple assertion, but it reminds us that behind any fame or glamor attached to someone who has done something is the doing itself.

There’s a lot more to be said on this subject. I only come to it this morning because I am working on a photo-essay, an argument by illustration is what I am calling it, for a start-up journal. It’s on the boats, of course — which is nice after taking a hiatus to work on the Project Bamboo scholarly narratives. And what brought me to say out loud “I love what I do” was writing on some photographs I had printed out with a permanent marker, numbering them and also marking topics within the image that I wanted to pursue. I love the feel of it.

One Digital Difference

2009-07-16

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Recently in the Digital Humanities On-line Seminar, there arose the question of what difference does being digital make? Or, rather, does it many any real difference apart from speeding things up? That is, has the digital only sped up otherwise conventional work?

I have two responses to such a question. The first is the observation that at least one dimension of this question suggests that speeding things up or making more convenient certain facets of work are trivial. I make no claim that any work getting done within a quickened digital regime is any better than work done by hand — one imagines the shuffling of note cards versus a quick search through a database, but the quality of the work is always in what was written on the cards, what was entered in the database. The absurdity of such claims is revealed in the fact that books and the printing press achieved the same, if not greater, speed of dissemination — and probably of composition later — than the previous tradition of copied manuscripts. So it’s not worth bothering about.

The other observation is that such speeding up or making more convenient is not enough, that unless computing radically transforms humanistic study, it has not lived up to its promise nor potential. My response to this dimension of the complaint is that such tipping points are rarely perceived during their own time but are usually discerned later. The tipping points are, in fact, sometimes a matter for historical argument.

That’s all fine and good. Let history decide and all that. In the mean time, I can report on one digital difference I have enjoyed in the lat few weeks.

I am finishing up work on my analysis of the scholarly narratives collected by Project Bamboo. In the end, I focused on forty or so texts that I first simply collected as text documents stuffed in a directory. I also had a list of the texts I had chosen in a table in a Word file. The two really needed to get together, and so, since my SQL-foo is still incredibly weak, and I didn’t feel like running sed or awk through my collection of texts, I decided to download and install Filemaker Pro — for the record that’s a link to the Amazon.com page and I would be indebted to anyone who wanted to buy a copy for me: UL is broke and I am on my own fronting the cost. Filemaker is a cross-platform database app that can also act a as a GUI front-end to MySQL databases, and so I am hoping it will help me make the transition.

I had already read and to some degree categorized all the texts I put into my Filemaker database, and I had already learned a fair amount about them using IBM’s Many Eyes — that link takes directly to the corpus I uploaded there and some of the visualizations I set up. With the FM database I was able to automate a few simple tasks, like determining the size of each text by counting its words. But where I was really able to fly was being able to do searches either on tags or on the texts themselves looking for particular words or usages. Almost instantly, I could pull up the 7 seven texts that mentioned X or the 12 that used the term Y.

All of this would have been perfectly do-able if all these texts existed only on paper, but the work would have gone much more slowly and I would probably have taken far fewer chances. (It may also be true that the slower work may have allowed for more digestion. I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s worth arguing.) What I liked was the ability to “play a hunch.” For me at least, sometimes scholarship is really about discerning patterns. The problem is at what level of cognition the patterns get distinguished. Quite often, for me at least, I know I sense a pattern but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I may even flounder around, scanning texts or flipping through pages hoping something will “catch my eye” or “jog my memory” or put the thought on the “tip of my tongue.”

One difference “the digital” makes in my own scholarship is being able to pursue a lead as soon as it pops into my mind. That may only amount to speed or convenience, but that’s a significant enough difference for me. Please don’t take my bionic memory, and recall, away from me.

Getting Back to My Roots

2009-07-15

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In the last few days I’ve had two interesting experiences of getting back to my roots, or at least glimpsing with pleasant recognition where my roots apparently lie.

The first moment occurred when I fired up a Pete Townshend playlist in iTunes and found myself singing along to “Athena” and quite happily finding it described my life in the present moment when I think about Yung and realize “I had no idea how much I’d need her.”

The second moment is a little less sappy. I’m working on what was simply to be an photo essay for Technoculture but has turned into, at least in the beginning, an essay with photos. I wanted to think a bit about the term technoculture itself, and, as fortune would have it — and sometimes fortune wouldn’t have it any other way — to Heidegger’s essay on “The Question Concerning Technology.”

First, it was radiantly wonderful, lo these many years later, to read an essay by Heidegger from start to finish without really struggling to follow the twists and turns of his intricate language turns. In fact, I recognized them as language turns and realized how much Derrida does, in fact, owe to Heidegger, which Derrida himself makes very clear. I remember still quite vividly struggling with the first essay I read by Heidegger in my “Philosophy and Film” at LSU, of thinking myself quite clever when, later in a seminar on the Pre-Socratics, I could glimpse the meaning of a paragraph or two on aletheia. Here, last night and today, I read through “The Question Concerning Technology” and not only followed his argument but had questions to ask back to old Martin.

Second, as I transcribed some of his text into my own, and thus found myself paying close attention exactly to how he puts things, I recognized the steady progression of parallelisms, of moving forward by moving sideways. I remembered how my own writing, which must have been influenced by my reading of Heidegger, stymied Louise Phelps at Syracuse University, who admired its “poetic nature” but found it often “too oblique.” I am not, in this moment, going to argue with her assessment. I think the only good news is that, in that moment, I wasn’t consciously aping Heidegger, which would have been entirely possible at that pretentious age.

Instead, like my earlier discussion of one’s sense of God, I am led to wonder if the way I think was shaped significantly by my reading of Heidegger or that I read him, cleaved to him, because in his writing I found a resonance with my own way of thinking?

Born and raised by an architect and interior designer, each of whom was competent with words but really more reliant on volumetric arrangement and reasoning, I probably found in Heidegger some way to express the way I thought. (I remember that I wanted to write a poem that would recreate the feeling one got when inside a cathedral.)

Speeding Up or Getting Around iDisk’s Sloth

2009-07-15

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Now that we are a two iPhone household, it is time to upgrade Yung to a full-fledged MobileMe account so that she can keep her contacts, calendars, etc. all in sync. And, hey, whaddaya know, there’s also this way to keep your files in sync, if, of course, it doesn’t fail every time you use it. (To be honest, it appears to be working okay for Yung, who has smaller, and usually fewer, files than I do — can I help it if I’m the media member of our household?) To be fair, I was added 1.4GB to my local iDisk and told it to sync overnight, which I figured it would take given our narrow “pipe” on our low-budget AT&T DSL connection. (Come on, LUS, bring us our FttH connection soon.)

Here’s what greeted me this morning:

Last sync failed

Here’s Apple’s advice:

5. Disable iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences), restart your computer, and connect directly to your iDisk. (From the Go menu, choose iDisk, then My iDisk.) If you are able to connect to your iDisk, turn iDisk Sync on again.

6. If the issue persists, reset iDisk syncing on your computer:

Turn off iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences).
Restart your computer.
From the Go menu, choose Home.
Open the Library folder.
For Mac OS X 10.5: Remove the FileSync folder
Restart your computer.
Re-enable iDisk Sync.

But I am also searching out workarounds — without going to a workaround that works entirely around iDisk, like DropBox. We’ve paid good money for iDisk; it should work. It should work out of the box, but barring that, it should work with some elbow grease applied to it.

One possibility is to use an alternate WebDAV client than the one built into the Finder, e.g. CyberDuck, which I already own (or donated to):

Server: idisk.mac.com
User Name: <your dot-mac account name>
Password:<your dot-mac password>
Initial Path: (unnecessary)
Port: 80 (default for protocol)
Protocol: WebDAV

It looks like another alternative is to connect directly to the iDisk using ChronoSync.

Jacob Bronowski on “The Ascent of Man”

2009-07-15

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The universe is sometimes an amazing thing. After yesterday’s correspondence with my dad, the Digital Humanities list brought me a link to this YouTube clip from Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man: