pink bunny of battle speaks out on academic freedom.

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re at war.”

Worthy read, this article here, if you are interested in an impassioned view of what’s going on in academia. This goes nicely with the Salon article link I posted recently, the one about Lynne Cheney and the NEH.

A bit lengthy, but worth a read. Thanks, George!

Want a Gmail account?

I’ve got a few invites. Leave me a comment if you want one, with your e-mail address please — or e-mail me, vika-wordsend-org. I’ll edit this post when they’re gone.

Salon.com takes on Lynne Cheney.

Looks like Mrs. Cheney is pretty ruthless in showing her disapproval of academic dissent with conservatism.

Disgusting and dispiriting. And this, just an hour after I read Allen Renear on getting government and university funding in humanities computing, from 2000:

But we must also be prepared for these efforts to fail. And if they do fail, when we fail at them, it must be with the grace that allows us to at once fail, and at the same time remain in the game, continuing our work. This means that we must give up the ‘everlasting delusion… [the] utopianism’ and instead ‘…cheerfully accept [our] inexorable destiny’. That destiny being that we will have to make our own way in the world, sustained by our conviction, courage, and skill, by our colleagues, students, and friends… and, above all, by the never-failing excitement of the work.

This is from “Humanities Computing 2000: Passion and Authenticity,” pp. 27-39 in: Domenico Fiormonte, ed. Informatica umanistica. Dalla ricerca all’insegnamento (Humanities computing. From research to teaching), Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2003. Renear quotes from J. Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, London: Routlege, 1998.

I’ll be drinking to that tonight. It’s been a day of extremes.

Comfort food.

I’m afraid my entry into the distributed cookbook will be somewhat disappointing for George, since it’s…

well, it’s miso soup.

And I’ve never made it. But going to some Japanese place and ordering a bowl of that stuff when I’m feeling cold and miserable, mmmm. It cheers me right up.

The next thing I think of, when contemplating comfort food, is actually chicken soup. To wit:

a few large pieces of chicken
(I don’t much like white meat, so tend to get leg quarters)
1 onion
a couple of carrots
a couple of celery sticks
a couple of potatoes
fresh dill and parsley, the more the better
a tablespoon of Vegeta, more to taste
large pot

Throw the chicken in large pot, fill with water. Don’t ask me how much of either, because I don’t know. You know the largest pots in the cheapo sets they sell at Walmart? I’d probly put two leg quarters in that, and fill it almost-full of water, with just enough space to spare to put all the other stuff in.

Put that in, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer, wait until the foam floats up. Skim off the foam.

Put in everything else except for the herbs. I usually put in the onion whole, and at the end throw it out, but that’s because I don’t like boiled onions. If you’re using Vegeta, watch out: it contains salt already, so don’t add any more salt. Add other seasonings if you like, but I usually leave it at that. Cook until the vegetables are done, probably 15-20 minutes.

Throw in the herbs, taste and adjust the seasoning. I generally throw in a liiittle bit more Vegeta, or leave it be.

Let the herbs cook a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat, cover, let stand for as long as you can bear it. Ladle into bowls and grind some black pepper into that. Mmm.

Drugs no longer leads to sex. Sex leads to drugs.

Beware the thunder of teenage sexual activity. For it is a Dangerous and Bad thing.

I feel like screaming.

(via David, by way of the NNN.)

Open access and funding.

I’m reading Peter Suber’s article titled Promoting Open Access in the Humanities. It talks pretty thoroughly, and – refreshingly – with no obvious bias or bitterness about the differences in funding between the humanities and the STM (science-technology-medicine) fields. One part amused and struck me in particular:

The most succinct wisdom on the usefulness and fundability of humanities research was uttered by Aristippus, a Greek philosopher who sought patronage from one rich Athenian after another. Dionysius once asked him, “Why do I always see you philosophers knocking on the doors of the rich, but I never see the rich knocking on the doors of philosophers?” Aristippus replied, “Because philosophers know what they need and the rich don’t.”

Hear, hear. What a great testimony to the necessity of the humanities, and it’s coupled with an attitude I share: I’ve got a pretty low patience threshold for defending my subject matter. If an adult I’m talking to doesn’t understand the necessity of knowing and practicing the arts, literary arts included, they’re probably beyond my help.

Happily, the people I surround myself with generally don’t need to be convinced of this. But chances are, the person next to me in the supermarket line is a different matter. Sometimes that makes me sad, and reminds me that not being in this for the money is the only sustainable option.

The Annotated Hasheesh Eater

Fritz Hugh Ludlow’s 1857 The Annotated Hasheesh Eater is now out on CD-ROM. There’s a sample annotated chapter on the site, and it’s pretty fascinating.

The CD’s reading interface, if the sample web page is anything to go by, isn’t terribly pretty. But the book seems interesting enough that I might just get it. Apparently, there are some other 19th-century works about cannabis on the CD. Good going for the editor: in this age of renewed “reefer madness” scaremongering and awful levels of misinformation, I love it that books like this are still coming out.

World atlas

RIP Julia Child, at 91.

It’s true.

Perhaps this weekend I’ll cook something out of her recipes.

Top o’ the morning to you too, Collie.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell says Japan must consider revising its pacifist constitution if it wants a permanent UN Security Council seat.

Even with an election looming, apparently we have no intention of stopping spouting inanities.

You tell me, who are we to tell Japan to not be pacifist? What business do we have telling another world power to change its constitution to a more war-loving one or be excluded from playing policeman to the world? And anyway, doesn’t the world need some peace-loving policemen at this point?..

And in the same breath, he takes a jab against one of his own [previously-] enlisted men, presuming him guilty and a deserter before proven so. Un. believable.

The Lightning Field gets props from Wired.

It’s a nice article. Of course, it doesn’t – can’t – communicate the utter quiet of the huge valley surrounded by mountains on all sides, in the middle of which are you, with your four hundred lightning rods and your cabin. There were grey rabbits, or maybe hares, living underneath the stairs of the cabin last August, reasonably cautious but unafraid of people.

No TV, no computers, no telephone service except for an emergency landline. Huge orange moon looking in the window, and in the morning, cicadas and a groundhog eight feet away from you, going about his business. Twenty-four hours of stillness.

But I’m still gonna post about politics.

Because, come on! How can I avoid the daily temptation?

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

Yet another reason I wish I were going to Hypertext.

I’d love to go to HT04. Sadly, it’s not in the cards this year, but next year for sure. (That’s what I’ve been telling myself for the past three, but well, see my previous post.)

Doug Engelbart will give a keynote there. Here are a few pertinent interviews, including one with him.

A job, and other changes.

This past Monday, I started my new job as Project Director of the Virtual Humanities Lab, a new NEH-sponsored project based here at Brown.

But what about your studies, you’ll ask? Dissertation and all that? Degree? Well, it went like this.

This past spring, the Virtual Humanities Lab Project was awarded a new NEH grant. Sadly, for a variety of reasons our Project Director Cristiana Fordyce was unable to stay with VHL. Suddenly, the project was in need of a director, and the position was offered to me. I considered the implications carefully, and accepted.

The core team for the project is one I’ve been a part of for years, with the Decameron Web. I know most of the quirks, and think that we’ll work really well together.

It’s a great opportunity. I will be working closely with both scholars and STG folks to create an infrastructure to enable collaborative scholarly annotation online, as well as to promote pedagogical use of our texts (which now include more than just the Decameron, and other authors besides Boccaccio). The principal elements of the job include grant report writing, research and paper writing (for conferences and publication), team management (gosh, but I dislike the T word…), technical documentation writing and complex Web tool design. I feel up to all of this, and think that it will significantly expand my skillset.

I was worried, of course, about the dissertation writing issue. Having seen too many of my colleagues struggle with this, and knowing my own weaknesses, I don’t expect to be able to write the dissertation in off-work hours. The decision was complicated also by the fact that the Graduate School had awarded me a dissertation fellowship for the next academic year.

This complication, however, turned out to also be the solution: the Graduate School agreed, contrary to its usual procedure, to defer the fellowship; so that I am assured to have it for the 2006-7 academic year, when I’ll hopefully be finishing up the degree.

The research and paper writing I mentioned above, which comprise a significant percentage of the job time-wise, should be more or less directly applicable to some of the theoretical parts of my dissertation. I also plan to continue hunting for more primary sources for Roland^HT, and encoding them for experimentation during the intervening two years.

I should note that, although Cristiana has taken a [great!] job elsewhere, we still plan to work together, even with our third British musketeer Guyda Armstrong, on Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

And that’s my news. The above is a modified copy-and-paste from an e-mail I sent to my dissertation committee; if it seems dry, it’s because I wasn’t sure they’d approve. So far, though, they seem to think this is a good thing, and I’m very glad for that. Their collective brilliance rather intimidates me on a regular basis.

Hopefully, this’ll mean I’ll be blogging more, too, and getting much more use out of that “humanities computing” category. Maybe I’ll even redesign my weblog, and port it to WordPress. Who knows?

Hello once again, Big Brother.

Someone pointed me to this article by Ron Paul. Curious and still a bit disbelieving, I googled. Hunh. The American Community Survey does exist, and it is scary.

Answering it, if they ask you to, is apparently compulsory. Just take a look at the list of questions in the various PDF files. Gah.