jump start

Been a while since I’ve blogged publicly, hasn’t it? Hello, again.

I go to write this post, and notice a new comment from Regina, an old friend from Moldova who now lives in Israel, with whom I’d fallen out of touch a while ago. Holy cats. Hello, again. It’s lovely to hear from you.

(The timing of the comment and of my being compelled to write here again are a coincidence.)

Yeah, there’s been a lot of sadness that I’m not quite ready to write down. Luckily, the last month or so has also been filled with joy and light and smart people and work (hooray, work!), so it’s not like there’s nothing to tell.

My job at Boston University, the title of which has now settled at Digital Collections and Computing Support Librarian [in the School of Theology], rocks my socks so far. It’s not that I’ve done a whole lot, yet; it’s only been a month, and the end of the academic year at that, and my boss the head librarian has been out on vacation for the past two weeks, so things are relatively slow. On the other hand, there’s plenty to do in the computing-support half of the job. I’ve been learning [more] about how BU’s network is set up, which is nifty. We’re purchasing a big pile of equipment to replace old stuff – both servers and personal workstations for faculty and staff – which, you know, from the support standpoint is great. Soon there’ll be no more @$#%! five-year-old Dells to support, and many of the four-year-old machines are going away too. People are open to the idea of Macs, which is huge in such a behemoth mostly-Windows org. (BU is an immense bureaucratic machine, and I say that with all the affection that one would expect a girl to have for her alma mater.)

Best of all, people want to learn. I’ve been getting to know the faculty and staff. Some of them are already doing digital humanities projects (like the History of Missiology site). Others have cool ideas (hello, Admissions Director using Facebook in all kinds of cool community-building ways). And still others want to figure out how computing can make their research and teaching (and administration, and the school as a community) more awesome.

This is what they hired me to work on. I’m unspeakably excited. Yeah, so far it’s been all support and no digilib, but I expect that to change. There’s a lot of hardware overhauling to do, and some basics to catch up on. That will take some months. But there’s already so much concrete investment of time, thought and resources in digital library stuff at STH that I have no doubt it’s going to go somewhere interesting.

Then there’s life outside of work. That’s been filled with friends, children, loved ones, cats, cooking, Burning Man planning, hand drumming, sci-fi reading, Battlestar Galactica, water and fire and earth, casual photography, breathing deeply. And the weather’s been nice.

Yesterday I flew to DC. Today I participated in a day-long grant proposal review panel for which I read a total of thirty proposals, which took an unreal amount of time and was fascinating and instructive, and I’m not being sarcastic about any of that. The panel itself was great too; in the past month or so I’ve learned a ton about the grant review and award process, and I fully intend to use this knowledge for good. I have generalized thoughts on the whole thing, but have to formulate them separately – must wrap my brain around the whole thing first, and also make sure not to cross any confidentiality boundaries. The whole thing made me feel awfully important, and going away for just over 24 hours meant I could travel with just my work bag, light and easy.

Coming back tonight, at the Reagan Airport, I texted a friend something to the effect of, I like traveling – the interstitial part, the going – even more than being places. She laughed and declared me liminal girl. Certainly that holds true for my life in a larger sense.

There’s more, always – the children I get to hang out with, the surprisingly strong presence of love in my days, feeling so strong from weightlifting with one of my dearest, the USB turntable I bought with which I’m digitizing records from the old country – but it’s 1:45am, and tomorrow’s a workday. Er, today. Whatever.

So, do I have a feed?

My RSS feeds have been (it seems from here) nonfunctional. Just did something that might fix that, so am posting to see whether it’s fixed.

Had an important, difficult, overwhelming weekend. As a result I feel even more groundless than before, but am seeking out more groundlessness. I’ve been afraid of throwing myself headlong into changing my life’s structure; for the most part that fear is no longer entirely paralyzing. It’s difficult but it’s also time to be awake and present.

Buddhists (at least Tibetan Buddhists) seem to believe that it’s precisely groundlessness, not counting on anything in particular and accepting extreme uncertainty, that is the most potentially fertile time in a life. Using various tools (books, lots of thinking, sitting in something approximating meditation) I’ve begun experiencing this fully for, I think, the first time in my life. It’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. It’s also liberating.

The thing I’m finding most difficult at the moment is committing to a path that involves other people, but committing to it alone. It happens to be a path that is, for the most part, uncharted waters: there are no social structures in place for it, few precedents, and if it doesn’t work, the consequences are… well, that’s the thing: I don’t know how the worst possible consequences of this path would be different from the worst consequences of a more traditional path. Mostly I don’t think they’d be different at all, and ultimately I’d rather try than not try and wonder whether I could’ve done it. So bring on the fear.

—
Edited to add: My newsreader’s feed for Words’ End still isn’t working. Never mind. Ethan to the rescue again. There it is, the feed. Halleluiah.

A revamped look for Words’ End, thanks to mindlace for always invaluable help. Much turbulence in the real world; I feel like the DNA goo that happens after a caterpillar dissolves inside the cocoon, but before a butterfly is reassembled. Here’s hoping for that butterfly at the end…

You tell me.

What should I write about next?

Turnabout.

Once again I keep getting these flashes of “should really blog that!” and then immediately “but there’s so much unsaid over there.” So, in short:

I defended and graduated.* To paraphrase my landlady, I’m Vika Zafrin, Ph.uckin’ D. That paraphrase involved changing fewer letters than you might imagine. For the first time in my adult life I am not a student pursuing a degree full-time at an institution. Mostly there’s a giant feeling of relief, but I already miss research. Although that balances out, because I sure don’t miss the constant insecurity, the “not good enough”ness, the 24/7 feeling like I have to be working.

OK, I still mostly feel like I should be working. But it’s getting easier to compartmentalize, and you know what? There’s a whole big life out there, with books and spiritual practice and cooking and friends and friends’ children and visits with mom, who lives in driving distance for the first time in thirteen years. Who knew?

Ethan and I have moved up to Boston. Best move we could’ve made. Wanderlust is tugging at my pants leg already, but I could be happy living in Boston for a long while. Given that wanderlust is my muse and near-constant companion, that’s a hefty statement to make.

The house we live in has seven human residents, five cats, a dog and (temporarily) a bird. Gods bless the marvel that is modern allergy medicine. Our two cats have established relationships with the three who have lived here for long. Nochka the tiny black cat has a hissy fit any time DJ Spooky, the black boycat thrice her size, comes into our bedroom seeking food. And there’s the impossibly beautiful lynx-y Winter, who is afraid of almost everyone. Other than that, feline people are chill. Humans are also mostly chill, and really, how bad can it get when you live with geeks and musicians (and a funny man who inexplicably deals with insurance all day)? A circus band occasionally practices in my living room. Beat that with a stick.

The past three months have been spent largely acclimating to the new house, the new life rhythms, the big questions like where to go from here and how to plan out the long term. I’m working outside of academe now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to stay away?

So much is changing. Mostly I like it. Some of it is hard growth, but on the whole I feel like I’m stretching after a long sleep.

*Oh, and my work? Here, in its entirety. Get yourself Firefox and enjoy. It’ll take half a minute or so to load, but is thereafter very fast.

Leave it to yet another public gathering…

…to get me blogging again. I hope.

Much has happened on the personal front. For one, I’m back to the PhD gig, writing my dissertation this year. Been kinda re-evaluating this whole blogging thing, but for now I’ll just try to blog the 2006 Readex Digital Institute in scenic (whooboy, is it scenic! seriously) Chester, Vermont.

the hyperlinked society

I’m sitting here at the Hyperlinked Society conference in Philadelphia, blogging it alongside mindlace. I’ll probly post something from each of the six panels and conclusion that has something interesting in it. Apologies if writing is incoherent. :) Also, these next few posts are notes; reflections later.

This thing is getting audio- and video-recorded; I’ll post a link if (when?) they post it online.

First session, “Mainstream Linking.” Jay Rosen, moderator, has asked the panelists how links work in their world and what they mean.

Tony Gentile, VP of Healthline, a vertical search engine focused on health information. They participate in search engine marketing – they specifically go out to buy links from Google, Yahoo etc. So which links to buy, how to present them to the user, and what will the user see if they click on the ad link? Generally with linking there’s a feeling of reciprocity, he says, but one of the companies they had a contract with made back-linking a mandate. The link has transcended hypertext: they’ve developed an API that emulates a link structure. Also, they work to circulate people to the main areas of their site. In addition, esp. with health information, they have to be discerning as to whom they link to – and their whitelist (algorithmically and somewhat manually generated) contains about 170,000 companies.

Tom Hespos, President of Underscore Marketing, LLC, “a marketing guy” says the moderator. Hespos works with clients to get them “more linked in” – but he’s also a journalist and a blogger, and that gives him a perspective that other marketing people may not have. Points to the debut of Google as the turning point in link importance. Google brought relevance back to search; gave links an intrinsic value that they’d never had before. This might have done a bit of evil, in giving that value to links, despite Google’s motto (”do no evil”). Linking is a vote of confidence: page A linking to page B puts in a vote for page B. This is true in blogging world; businesses want links so that they can be found, vote-of-confidence has nothing to do with their attitude re: links, and that – Hespos says – should change, and quickly.

Eric Picard, Manager, Ad Product Planning, Microsoft. (Gasp! Not the Evil Empire!!1! Ohh, I’ll get over it.) Works on team called “MS Digital Advertising Solutions.” Focused on long-range planning and emergent media. He spends time trying to understand the economic model of hyperlinking – connecting people to information and people to businesses that might be relevant to that information. He started out as a multimedia designer and moved to things like VR, and then the web. He takes a broad view to the issues of hyperlinking. Thinks about the ways in which people “move through information.” Thinks about video game advertising, digital TV, areas into which people step for the first time in a commercial setting. Question is, how do we do this commercial setting (advertising) that is beneficial both to the consumer and to the advertiser – or at least doesn’t infuriate the consumer? MS, he says, should be thought of as an “ecosystem company” (?!); defends the “good job” MS is doing, supporting the “ecosystems” they work with (operating systems, for example, the MS search engine…)

Jay Rosen, “a student of multimedia,” reflects on above:

- Raymond Williams (sociologist) says in Culture and Society: “There are no masses; there are only ways of seing people as masses.” He meant that you can’t go into a northern England home and find a Mass Person. People are complicated. They don’t obey formulas. What does exist are ways of addressing people as masses. Today, all the past ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart, they no longer work so well. Now we have to specialize, and learn how to see people as a public, a community, knowledge producers in addition to being consumers. We’re good at connecting people UP – to companies, to central powers. Broadcasting is a good example of that. Today, a lot of the transformation and disruption in the media world is because the internet is good at connecting people laterally, not just vertically. The cost of like-minded people to find/meet each other has gone way, way down. If they’ve found each other, in many ways they don’t need the mass media. This radically changes the balance of power in the media world.

This became even more interesting when Rosen discovered blogs through a student who showed him Instapundit, just one link from which can instantly give an obscure blog ten thousand readers. Whoa. Rosen’s blog is PressThink, and it blew his mind that he could now write about media without having to run his writing through that same media. Holy freedom, Batman.

Q&A session I’ll leave for Ethan to describe in more detail.

WordPress 1.5!

It is pretty. I’ve little time to play with layouts and themes now, so the site might look different at any point. It’ll likely be up at any given time, though. :)

So much to write. At least there’s like a whole week and a half at home. Maybe I’ll get to it. Geez, busy summer.

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.

[meta]

I keep feeling I should be blogging more, but you know, when it comes to impact on the outside world, blogging is just about the least useful activity I pursue regularly these days. It’s been important lately to feel useful.

Too bad that this feeling seems to be inseparable from a need to be appreciated. Luckily, I do not lack positive feedback. But I’m not crazy about the necessity of expending energy on my self-esteem. Shouldn’t that be all set, at my age?

(rhetorical question.)

Migrated!

With supremely patient help from Ethan, my blog is now WordPressed. Erm, sorry if that renewed all your RSS feed posts. But it’s worth it, oh yes it is.

While we were at it, I have redesigned the entire site; the main blog is now at the root, and there are some other changes. If you use a smart RSS aggregator, it’ll update the URL for the feed automatically (and there’s a permanent redirect in case it doesn’t). If you want to do it manually, and/or subscribe to the comments feed, look in the lower part of the left-hand column for links.

I’ve also started another blog, for matters geopolitical. It’s called Okno, and the first post contains more information on its raison d’être.

How I use MT

OK, I’ve been lame with blogging. We went on an apartment hunt, found one we fell in love with, and are now looking for a subletter for our current apartment. Of course, I still haven’t blogged the conference (but oh, I will one of these days when there’s a lot of time), but right now I’d like to address Mena’s post requesting information regarding how I use her software.

Here on Words’ End, I have a single blog (this one) with a single author. At present, that’s it; but I was planning to set up a collective blog for our next big research project at the Decameron Web, not only so that we might easily communicate with each other from different countries, but also to encourage dialogue by interested parties who aren’t directly involved.

I’m keeping my emotions out of the whole pricing-scheme thing until the educational pricing is publicized. Then, I’ll probably add another trackback to this post, which SixApart is graciously keeping online and trackback-able. Thanks, SixApart!!1!

escholarship repository, and a conference closer to home.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is a great resource. They do weekly updates, and they have a one-way announcement-only mailing list that I find very convenient.

Today, they pointed me to the eScholarship Repository at UC, which seems interesting, especially as we’re about to talk about e-journals at the upcoming conference.

Speaking of which, “Online Resources for the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” is this upcoming weekend, and is open to all. It’s officially bilingual in Italian and English, but English-language abstracts and outlines are being put up, and there’ll be simultaneous translation available during discussion sessions. Should be fun.

images people post

This little toy aggregates and displays the latest images that LiveJournal users have been posting. “They may be subject to copyright and may not be work safe,” reads the warning. LJ users seem to post images rather frequently – every time I reload the page, all of the new loads are completely different. Of course, LJ has what, over a million users? So the volume is not that surprising. Amusing, though.

While we’re at it, Ethan pointed me at Random Personal Picture Finder ™, which makes up a random string likely to be commonly used by digital cameras, and searches Google Images for it.

arRSSgh

Every time I change the RSS template, LiveJournal reads them as new messages and thus reposts them to people’s friends lists and flooding.

Sorry about that. I’ll leave the template alone now.

RSSing it

Just downloaded NetNewsWire, which seems like a nice gadget for blog reading.

Oh, the tragedy! Fully half of the bloggers I want to read put only excerpts of their blogs into their RSS feeds. So I actually have to click on the link to the entry, if I want to read the whole entry.

I’d really rather not, in most cases. There are many people (including myself) who make the full entries, including images and/or comments (that last one I should really figure out), available through syndication. Is there a good reason not to do it?

link to blogrolling

Okay, so it’s not just me. In case you haven’t noticed yet either, blogrolling.com changed the pinging URL. It is:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

So change the preferences in your software of choice, and you should be all set.

grr argh, blogrolling!

I’ve got MovableType pinging blogrolling.com every time I update, and for the last several days that ping has returned an error (the activity log just says “failed”). Anyone else have this problem?

Jill, and blog aesthetics.

Lucky us! Recently-defended Dr. Jill Walker rewarded herself for her hard work with a trip to the States, and came to talk at Brown yesterday. She’s a brilliant scholar and a wonderfully social person, and has the rare gift of effortlessly keeping your attention when talking about scholarship. In talking with her over the last few days, I realized that the design of one’s own weblog has everything to do with updating frequency. My log had been aesthetically displeasing to me, but I hadn’t [had|taken] the time to modify it. It’s not the world’s most beautiful now, but it’s cleaner, and I can tweak it from here. Immediately, I am more inclined to update it.

The snow just hasn’t stopped. This is the day on which I regret having cancelled ‘net service from home: soon, I will walk through the windy streets for at least half an hour, to get home from the office. It’s odd to be looking forward to facing the elements so late in the evening; the wind is lashing the trees, and the cold is likely to be biting. But it seems like a good thing to do anyway. Clear my head.

Trackback

I know, so much news to write up, and all I want to do is post a link?? How lame. Well, it’ll have to do for now: I’d like to come back to this when planning my syllabus for next spring. Though I’m writing, really.

Any blogging and personal e-mailing is done at the direct expense of work time, which is scarce as it is. Nevertheless, I look forward to the distractions: they give perspective to these otherwise turbulent days.