News of the Weird.

[The subject of this post has nothing to do with this awesome site, and I hope that by advertising them I get to use their name in my lowly post without fear of wrath.]

Well, this is something to look forward to when we’re biking around Denmark.

Straight out of a Greek myth, this one. “And the birds pecked out his liver over and over and over again until the END OF TIME.”

Thanks to Wil for the midday injection of surreality.

PSA: comments moderated for now.

Now that this very strange commentary debacle is over (and people seem to have gotten bored with attacking my love, too), I’m turning on comment moderation. Spammers have figured out how to both get through my comment-spam-posting blocks *and* prevent WordPress from sending me a ping that a comment has been made. So I have to keep a watchful eye myself, and frankly, it’s exhausting.

When we upgrade to WordPress 1.5, this might be easier. But first we have to find the time to do it.

OK, mister. Either you outlaw email, or you pass me that waterpipe right now.

From The Guardian:

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached “startling” levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

(See also this article in The Register.)

[self-promotion] Digital Medievalist article published!

The inaugural issue of Digital Medievalist is up online. One of the articles in it is “Towards the Electronic Esposizioni,” which I co-wrote with the inimitable Guyda Armstrong. It was great fun to write, and we like to think it is readable by the General Audience. Comments, as always, welcome and appreciated.

Satchmo, well, I never!

Britney Spears’ signature “Oops! I did it again” is actually a remake of an old Louis Armstrong song. Who knew?

Wanna see something weird?

Today I witnessed Escalation of Emotional Stakes on the net in a particularly colorful manner.

Ethan wrote this post in his blog, somewhat alarmingly titled “Sexist Assholes on Ye Interwebbe.” He was recounting his experience being a member of the community called themaxx: [this might be offensive]. It’s one of those places where members post found or original pictures they find interesting, and then have other members rate them and comment on them.

Ethan’s post gathered a few flames at mindlace.net; and, looking over his shoulder, I read the bunch of comments that got posted on themaxx.com directly. Many were flames. (You have to be a member to view the comments, so I don’t have the link to that.)

Then I get a new comment to a post I made in January, by one Bertram Livestock who, like a knight in shining armor, warns me away from my friend mindlace. I posted a lengthy reply to him there, and you know, it’s some of the best stuff I’ve written lately. So go read both Bertram’s comment and mine; I assure you, it’s worth it. I’m still giggling at the power of Google [which is how I’m assuming he found me].

NWF on digilit

Went to a talk today, the last (?) in a series of lectures on digital literature in research and teaching. This one was by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a charismatic polymath. The man does it all: he teaches writing in odd spaces, he blogs (at Grand Text Auto), he has co-edited a couple of books, and he’s an active participant in various electronic literature and art communities in addition to being an artist himself.

Today, Noah theorized about both digital literature itself and approaches to teaching it. Two things struck me in particular.

One is his classification of important aspects to consider when looking critically at digital literature and art, broadly defined as that which requires computation. Noah went through several classification schemes that are both useful and not meant to be exhaustive. For example, there are works in which computation happens without human intervention (for example, email novels), as opposed to pieces that require a lot of very obvious human input (interactive fiction comes to mind). A few more two-sided classifications, and he arrived at the poignant triad of media (text, image, sound), audience and processes (computational and aesthetic). All of these, he said, must be analyzed preferably in depth, and in relation to each other, in order to understand digital literature and art and their impact on our thinking.

The second part of Noah’s talk centered around pedagogical issues that immediately arise when one proposes to teach digital literature to humanities students. The single most important thing, from his perspective, seems to be the teaching of processes: recognizing them in code, critically analyzing them from an aesthetic perspective, and designing them as well. This should be achieved not only through familiarization with theory but also through the learning of languages that can be used to design processes. Michael Mateas and his teaching at Georgia Tech came up multiple times; apparently his students are learning all these things, and in the span of a semester at that. Impressive.

Of course, I immediately started thinking (again) about how all these things could be effectively and concisely taught to humanities students. Those who study digital media specifically, as a major or a minor, are one thing; but what about the students whose principal interests remain firmly in history, sociology, literature? How does one cover different types of digital art and its various backbones, and teach them to not only read but also write creatively in heretofore unfamiliar languages, not to mention how to familiarize themselves with critical literature which might be absolutely relevant to what they are doing but is presented as computer science papers, which they might have difficulty reading or indeed finding in the first place? All of these things, Noah said today, are crucial; but they’re a [composite] field unto themselves.

Noah’s passionate enough about the necessity of knowing all these things that he was willing to “do away with calculus” (joke!, or is it?) in favor of having more space in the curriculum for cross-disciplinary study of digital literature and art. I tend to agree with him on this; as cool as calculus is, the knowledge of (dare I say it?) humanities computing issues is more practically useful if presented well. Computing and the network are now indelibly interwoven into our lives as individuals and as societies. My own feeling is that understanding of computing as both art and science is as important as the study of languages, of public speaking and of writing.

Challenges remain. Literary criticism, for example, must expand its scope to include digital materials as a matter of course. At the same time, it would be helpful if computer scientists and humanists came up with a reasonably penetrable common language that would make it easier for students of digital media to read literature relevant to their studies.

College curricula must be expanded to eventually include humanities computing in a way that targets all students; I think that the conglomerate of subjects this implies is crucial and should be a requirement for a well-rounded education. The problem with this is that some colleges are already brimming with required courses. In the States at least, where college education particularly emphasizes personal choice, expansion of the set of general education requirements will probably be met with much scepticism and resistance. This, of course, leads straight into the problem of primary and secondary education, which is frankly crap in this country, widespread inadequate preparation for college-and-beyond. (Generalizing for the sake of brevity; yes, private schools etc., I’m talking overall and public schools.)

Anyway, good talk. More interesting stuff was said there, but these are the broad strokes.

On the Catholic Church.

Was just responding to a friend’s blog post, and thought I’d post this here, since it more or less sums up my feelings about the new pope (aside, of course, from great disappointment, apprehension, disgust and red-hot hate for the entire Church.org).

(…which should not be confused with my attitudes towards the faith itself, and towards its devout followers. Okay? Okay.)

Anyway, the blogger said:

the Church needs to be willing to talk about social issues realistically if it doesn’t want to become increasingly irrelevant in the face of massive drop-offs in churchgoing across Europe.

I believe that process is already well under way. In Italy, Italy!, not many people are going to church on a regular basis:

“A Frank Bruni article in The New York Times on October 13, 2003, pointed out that 33 percent of Italians described religion as “very important” but as few as 15 percent are going to church every week, according to recent polls.”

The institution of the Catholic Church needs to get even more ridiculous before real change can be effected. Either that, or it will lose its power, and you know what? That’s not a bad thing. Devout Catholics might be heartbroken, but they really need the courage, and the incentive, to find their way to their God despite the corrupt, backwards, power-hungry and actively harmful people who stand between the populace and their faith.

It’s not that I don’t believe anything good can ever come out of the Vatican. It’s that it usually doesn’t. Quite the contrary.

Down with the corrupt Church! Viva la fede!!1!

Damnit all!

Can’t have a cathartic evening without someone posting a llama song.

Catchy.

the mind’s eye is

No, there’s more nuance to it. And, lucky you, I feel like spilling it all over my blog.

This is me at one of my more negative moments. The other end of the spectrum can be just as intense. But right at the moment, things are pretty bleak over at words’ end.

I’ve been thinking about feminism. It’s hard not to these days, really. Jill is this awesome, shiny, curly-lock’ed powerhouse of a blogging theorist and head of her department, and writes on feminist topics to do with both politics and with her work. The misbehaving posse are eloquent and on point without coming across as gratuitously bitter, by which I personally am inspired. Hanna is kicking all kinds of arse as a Debian developer and advocate for women in computing.

Humanities computing is by no means a boys’ club. I don’t have any actual statistics, and it’s likely that men do outnumber women in the field, just like most (any?) other academic fields. But I’ve never felt shut out because I’m female; and certainly there is no lack of role models to follow.

Ethan and I talk about gender, its physiology and its politics, quite a lot. In him I have found the kind of feminist I hope every man – and woman – would be. He is well read and astute in general, and his interest in evolutionary biology has led to some very interesting conversations about how gender differences have evolved, how they’re expressed in other animals, how different human societies deal with them.

(As an aside, have you ever read Shanshan Du’s Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs? It’s a great read. The Lahu have their problems, but they’ve got the gender stuff worked out.)

OK, so do we all agree here that men and women are different? Because we are, right? In many, many respects. A tiny change in physiology (and it really is tiny, all things considered) results, in most of us, in different attitudes, different… orientations. In most of us. Lately gender identity has come to the political forefront, and we’ve discovered that it’s not quite so black-and-white.

I am most decidedly female. Perhaps a little more outspoken than some, perhaps a bit harsh at times, but a woman. I watch myself behave in ways that have been pegged as stereotypically female, and find that this is where I want to be.

So, here’s where I want to be: I want to be secondary.

Seriously. I want to be someone’s assistant. I make a good administrator. I am happier making sure that things run smoothly than I am writing papers. This bothers me on a fundamental level.

It’s possible that these are years of being a student speaking: I’m tired of being a student. Even now, on a leave of absence and with a “real job,” I’m a student and will need to write a dissertation by something like May of 2007. I’m sick of writing papers, because I don’t feel like expressing new opinions. Doing research is absolutely equivalent in my head to proving myself – to professors, to colleagues, to myself. I hate it. I hate the insecurity, and I hate even more my conclusion that this insecurity is not the result of The Man puttin’ me down. Nobody’s been putting me down. Nobody but me.

There’s a conflict here: most of me doesn’t feel put down when I think of a life as a mother and keeper of the homestead, possibly working part-time making food for people or pulling espresso shots (both being alternate-reality dreams of mine, that I will quite possibly pursue when I retire… or sooner). Most of me has been actively developing this aversion to putting myself on the line, proving myself to anyone. A large part of me wants to only ever do for money what I already know how to do, and doesn’t want to learn anything new.

For money. That’s a crucial thing. I don’t think I could stop reading, ever. Learning new things, fiddling with XSLT, finding cool ways to keep my occasional students of Italian excited about the language, all these things are great. As long as I choose to do them.

Classic, huh?

The feminist in me is all up in arms because of this. I’m capable of More Than That. (What in the seven hells does that mean?)

Goddamnit, I love humanities computing. I love my current job. I love gradually getting a wider and wider perspective on the wonder of human communication via language. The parallels between us and people who lived hundreds, thousands of years ago are often unexpected and always great fun to discover. So why am I periodically so torn up, why do I want to hide and never tell anyone who professionally matters to me what I’m thinking? Why am I terrified of this?

The cards are stacked in my favor, here. Ever since I decided not to pursue the Italian Studies PhD any longer I’ve been happy in academe. It’s been home. The papers I’ve given have mostly failed to suck; my boss has recently called me a dynamo to a third party; my doctoral committee have been very supportive of this unorthodox track of a PhD in humanities computing. Gosh darn it, that oughta count for something.

I’m going to finish this two-year gig, and immediately after that I’ll finish the PhD, and these things aren’t true because I’m feeling the need to prove something. They’re true because I want to do this.

But I’m terrified, and am tired of being so scared, and every time it comes back it’s stronger and harder to deal with. A large, visceral part of me is screaming every time I realize that I’ve put myself out there and seem to have no energy to see it through. The fact that this happens more often when my hormones are all out of whack is only important to a point, since (a) this isn’t an absolute correlation, and (b) the hormone jumps don’t make any of this shit less real.

Energy always comes in the end, from someplace or another. But right now, I just want to hide.

Academe is a lonely place, but for better or worse it’s home. I’ve only got one life. How do I know the wisest way to spend it that will also make me consistently happy?

[Re-reading this, it occurs to me: among other things, what I actually want is acknowledgment on the part of Society At Large of the importance and relevance of my work to itself. Fat chance.]

…

In other news, I’ve been in an intermittently shitty mood lately. Rampant self-doubt, inability to communicate adequately (to my own standards, anyway; some may have noticed, some not), mood swings at the most inappropriate of times.

Today, I want to be a housewife, so that I am never again required to prove anything to anyone. I mean, except for my loving husband, but I think I could manage to keep him happy.

This has been prompted by some things, some failings of mine, some hormonal ups and downs, but mostly it’s just a bad confluence of events. Phooey.

Tell me a joke.

Bike! Or, um, not.

So, Mona (the administrative deity at my work) called us on Saturday morning (!) to tell us that, having come in randomly to pick something up, she noticed that our bike was here.

BIKE!!1!

Of course, our lazy morning swiftly became excited morning jumping around with one pant leg on, with one hand brushing the teeth. We flew (read: drove obeying all the traffic signs, officer!) to the Italian department…

…to find that I’d left my keys at home. D’oh.

Luckily, Simona the Visiting Prof was just getting in to do some work, so she let us in.

Two boxes. In them, two suitcases. In the suitcases, which convert into a trailer, a deconstructed tandem. W00t!

We happily got brunch at Whole Foods, intent on going to Providence Bicycle and getting saddles and some other stuff. Chattering like sparrows on the first day of spring (and what do you know, it was sunny and warm!), we ate gorgeous salad and drove over to the store…

…to find out that it was “closed for Sabbath.” D’oh.

Ethan laughed and laughed. He has this maniacal laugh whenever something happens that’s just the classic “nyah-nyah” from the multiverse. I love that laugh, it’s infectious. Undeterred, we went home and put it together. Without the saddles.

Sunday, lo and behold, was another Good Weather Day. We went to PB, got everything we needed….

…back up a little, because this is germane to the story. We deconstructed the tandem in order to fit it into the car. Even with it taken apart almost completely, it was a bit of a pain to put it in the car, and it took up all of the back seat. (It would’ve probly fit in the trunk if we’d taken it All the Way Apart, but we were trying to figure out the most efficient way to deal with the bike on a regular basis.)

We got the stuff, got some munchies, made sure the water bottles were full, and headed off to a nearby state park.

Mmmm, pretty park. We parked and put the thing together. It took about 10-15 minutes, and it was getting hot, so we were eager to go go go. We went!, and…

Oh wow. Ow. Tandem riding is HARD.

Especially if your pedals don’t spin independently. You pretty much have to be, like, a SINGLE PERSON.

Plus, of course, we had to fiddle with seat height and bar height and the clip pedals were weird. Have you ever tried to clip into a pedal while it was being spun by your partner’s efforts, and simultaneously attempt to assist those efforts with your other foot? It took us probably about half an hour to cease seeing our parked car when we looked behind us. And the trail is a loop.

We laughed, we panted, it was fun and frustrating as all hell. The hub gear shifter wasn’t working correctly. When we stopped, we kept trying to dismount on different sides. We’d been planning on picking up a bike-only trail, but didn’t find it, and cars kept passing us on the main park road.

At one point, I told Ethan: “This is like marriage-cooperation bootcamp! If we make it on this thing, we’ll get through anything together!”

Okay, so there were grumpy moments. But really, it was mostly fun. By the end of the long loop, we were already learning to work together. It felt good.

And yet, we’re returning the thing. For a bike whose very idea is compactness and ease of [dis]assembly, it’s a surprisingly clunky process to get it to the point where it fits anywhere in the car. Sadly, given our purpose (among other things, biking Denmark on our honeymoon, which will probably involve several bike rides to train stations followed by the folding/packing of said bikes), it’s impractical for us to keep it.

We’re gonna get singleton folding bikes. They’ll still rock, but I’ll miss the tandem experience.

Blowed up!

1. I have another, a much better, update. Some exciting things are going on this weekend. But I will not write it until tonight, in order that the story be complete.

2. I do, however, have a reason for posting. This, this is the reason I *heart* Burning Man.

139 days!

Conversation just now.

[while both of us are doing our own little computer thing, totally strung out from an evening out in Boston conversing with folks on philosophical topics]

“…Looks like I’m officially volunteering for ***.
   ”Spanky is looking forward to working with me!”

“Aaand you’re looking forward to working with Spanky!”
   ”…Perhaps you should write that to Spanky. Otherwise Spanky will be sad.”

“And you don’t want Spanky to be sad.“

Sixty years.

Sixty years ago today the British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A BBC reporter was with them, and BBC has published a photo slideshow overlaid with his report. It’s only a minute and a half long, but it’s sad, so sad. Don’t click if you can’t bear to watch; the images don’t hide anything.

The article about this camp, not far from Hanover in Germany, is here. There’s a bad scary image there, too.

(via NNN)

Check this out.

It’s in the calculator!

(Google link, totally worksafe.)

Ohh no.

I’ve discovered FlickrBlog. There goes productivity.

Courtesy of the blog, I give you marmosets and the Flickr song. (If you’re having trouble hearing the lyrics, they are helpfully provided here.)

Thought of the day.

From a mailing list I’m on, for your amusement:

“Compared to meditation, liturgy is like going to a monster truck show!”

I’m working: Wednesday afternoons I tutor, so they’re geeenerally longer days. This has been the week of (figuratively) beating myself over the head with the notion of “if you just start doing whatever it is you don’t want to do, chances are you’ll find it all kinds of fun.” No duh, but sometimes it takes a while to sink in again.

In other news, writing a paper with a co-author is more fun than writing it alone. More frustrating at times (timing, disagreements, what have you), but more stimulating, therefore more fun.

Thanks to mindlace, the flickr zeitgeist on my home page is full of wedding photos. *happy wiggle*

Design site/book

From Halley Suitt’s blog: check out Thoughtless Acts, a site/book concerning human-oriented design. Leaving aside the fact that it’s a Flash site (bleah, accessibility-wise), looks interesting.

A very confused fiction seller.

Fictionwise sells e-books. Some are free! Neat, yes?

Take a look at this Jules Verne classic. Click on the cover, to get a larger popup image of said cover. Giggle.