Last month I attended THATCamp Prime and along with re-connecting with colleagues at The Well and making new friends throughout the three days, I left with a mission: THATCamp Jr. I was more than a little excited. David Morgen, Leeann Hunter, Raf Alvarado, and I had a plan. David and I had kids, and we’d drafted Pete Rorabaugh to bring his kids along too. We were going to make a movie and—following the THATCamp and unconference model—let the kids be in charge. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, it’s possible that plenty could have gone wrong, with the main thing simply being the difficulty of getting three dads (two of them single fathers) to find a time when vacations, work, and other responsibilities made it possible to try something new and novel. While some last minute dissertation edits tried to interfere, we found a weekend, invited as many people as we could, and just did it.

We got our eight kids (ages ranging from 5-13) together on a Friday afternoon to hash out themes and characters. David’s and Pete’s kids had already had a chance to discuss what they wanted the movie to be about and they’d reached a conclusion that appealed to mine as well: zombies. Much excitement ensued at this point.

We distributed the eight kids around the Emory Writing Center, where David is Assistant Director, and got them to start thinking about possible plot points. Some kids drew pictures of their characters; others created possible scenarios; all of them started talking about props. David, Pete, and I were joined by Leeann and Katy Crowther, allowing us to give individual attention to most of the kids and ask them questions about the ideas that they were rattling off. After everyone had some time to brainstorm (pun completely intended), we circled the wagons and gave everyone a chance to share their ideas. Continuing to talk with the kids, we coalesced several suggestions into some workable set pieces, getting a storyline together using something from each child. At the end of about two hours, we had a good sense of the props we needed and the costumes that everyone would bring to the next day’s filming. Our family was in charge of ninja swords, police badges, limes, and plastic food (trust me on those last two).

The next day, we met bright and early (9am) with our props and good attitudes. Since it’s summer in Atlanta, we decided to start with filming the outside portion. David had scouted a great spot for one portion of the film and when we arrived, we found everything we needed within 100 feet. The only problem was that we were near some massive part of Emory’s physical plant that created so much noise it would be impossible to capture any spoken audio. In true THATCamp fashion, however, we decided to roll with that sucker punch and make a silent film. Doing so would eliminate the need for the kids to remember lines.

As we started filming the scenes we asked the kids how they thought things should play out, who should enter scenes from where, and what their characters would do. We started with a series of shots of the ninja grocery store (stick with me here) and the beginning of some battles. The kids were having so much fun being ninjas, and the dads were having so much fun thinking of different angles we’d like to have in our dailies that we spent a lot of time on the first group of scenes. We eventually moved on to the zombies—although the convincing it took for some kids to shed their ninja gear for zombie lurches was not insignificant. As the morning wore on, it got progressively harder for the kids to reshoot scenes and for people some (read, my kids [and me]) to stay on task and focused.

Herding cats has got nothing on filming kids. #thatcamp Jr #THATCAMPjr

July 9, 2011 9:50 am via txtReplyRetweetFavorite

@briancroxall

Brian Croxall

Of course, keeping focused is perhaps not in the purview of a THATCamp. After all, shouldn’t we be free to un-organize ourselves? Still, we all had a goal, and I like to think that we fathers were there to play the role that caffeine and fructose perform at most other THATCamps. Eventually, though, we needed some real fructose. We were all glad to get a break for lunch somewhere not too far after noon. At that point we’d finished all the outdoors scenes, and the two indor scenes proved quick to do. The filming was finished at 2pm…

One red ant bite, a few sai wounds, and a pound of Swedish fish later, we've wrapped the filming at #thatcamp Jr. #fb #thatcampjr

July 9, 2011 12:49 pm via txtReplyRetweetFavorite

@briancroxall

Brian Croxall

Celebrations included brownies, laughter, large draughts of water, and some bonus kids courtesy of Katy and her family.

One of the oaths that I took outside the CHNM’s Research 1 Building was that when it came time to edit the film that I would put in as many terrible iMovie special effects as the kids saw necessary. I’d had in my mind that we would finish filming, import the clips into iMovie, and all sit around the computer editing collaboratively. The absurdity of that vision was much more apparent (even to me!) when we had eleven people in a room, all of them wanting to type on the computers that were already there. We decided not to attempt the editing that day. At a remove, this decision makes a lot of sense when I remember that our vision of THATCamp Jr evolved when I realized my kids aren’t ready to learn programming, even in Alice or Scratch. David, Pete, and I decided that we would try to get everyone a copy of the raw footage and then work on editing in our own homes.

For a number of reasons, that hasn’t happened. (#1: As big as storage media is these days, video files are still larger than is convenient. #2: We were already quite charmed to have pulled off 8 hours of collaboration. Asking for more is like asking for a unicorn hood ornament on the Lamborghini Countach your cousin gave you for your birthday.)

Once again, we hit a potential snag. We’d done the hard part of our project (see my incredibly clever “herding cats” comment above), but we didn’t have anything to show for it. Fortunately a champion emerged out of the mist at this point, and David began editing the files. He had the advantage, of course, of everyone discussing the vision of the film as we were making it. But that doesn’t do the editing for you, and David worked on several versions of the film before reaching what is for now the final cut. (I’d still like to get a raw copy of the footage and see what sort of a remix I can achieve.)

It’s with a slight quaver in my voice and a tear in my eye that I’m pleased to present…

Fish & Chips: Zombies vs Ninjas
A THATCamp Jr Project

www.youtube.com/watch?v=60C1OhVthLM

All of this was done at the cost of approximately $15 for supplies and about $8 for parking. Our gear included one Canon camcorder that is two or three generations old, two Flip cameras, a DSLR, and iMovie.

What did I learn? I learned that working with young adults in college has got nothing on working with kids…especially your own kids. These kids were so creative and willing to try new things. They were also ridiculously high energy and wore us out.

Honestly, I'm really exhausted after a full, full day of #THATCampJr filming #thatcamp.

July 9, 2011 1:09 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Scrivenings

Scrivenings

I also learned that it’s really possible to convert something from a Twitter “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to a completed project. I think it’s safe to say that we’re all tremendously proud of our kids, and I had a great time working with David, Pete, Leeann (who edited her behind-the-scenes footage into a great montage), and Katy.

What did our kids learn? I can’t speak for David’s and Pete’s kids, but I think mine would say that they learned how to fight vampires, how to film fights, and how to break a katana. Well worth a Friday afternoon and a Saturday morning.

What’s next for THATCamp Jr? At the risk of doing the predictable thing, I’m going to say that it depends on you. What will you try with your kids, your nieces and nephews, or the children you volunteer with? Pete, David, and I haven’t figured out what the next THATCamp Jr Atlanta will look like, but you can be sure that you and yours will be welcome. This is the South, after all, y’all.

If my memory doesn’t fail me, it was shortly after last year’s THATCamp at CHNM when a few friends and I started kicking around the idea of THATCamp Junior. I’m not exactly sure what made us think of the idea: it could have been the post-unconference love that made us want to all hang out again as soon as possible; it could have been Jason’s sending his son to “Adventures in Game Design” camp; but most likely it was the realization that we each had one or more children around the same age and the assumption that if their parents enjoyed each other’s company then of course the children would have as much fun with one another. The idea was to get our kids hacking, building, and learning alongside their parents, who would be able to help with different sessions based on their skill sets.

The idea of TC Jr got batted around a few other times in the subsequent months. It got so far this spring that my co-conspirators and I had begun a collaborative Google Doc (my preferred platform for conspiracies, although my vaporware-to-real ratio on such conspiracies is always in flux) and had chosen some dates for the summer. We even had a venue. We hit a snag, however, when we needed to decide whether or not we would make the event open to a large group of people or just restrict it to our friends. Restricting attendees seemed very counter to the idea of THATCamps, but I knew that if I was going to pitch the idea to my wife that we should take our family on a vacation to a place with a bunch of people she had never met that I was going to have be able to sell her on the people involved being very cool. Moreover, THATCamps work best when you have a limited attendance; the largest of them have been about 125 people. You hit that Dunbar number pretty quickly when you’re bringing entire families to an event.

Resolving this problem of inclusivity as well as how crazy everyone’s summer schedules are led to the GDoc being abandoned. On the evening before the camp started a week and a half ago, I found myself talking with Dan Cohen about some of the activities he does with his twin seven year-olds, I found myself starting to talk about TC Jr again. Since I had yet to propose a session for the Camp and since I knew that THATCamp session can be devoted to helping someone with a project they’re stuck on, I decided to propose a session on TC Jr. The session ended up being combined with one proposed by Christina Jenkins on thinking about getting K-12 students the training that they need to be ready for the digital humanities in college. Many people attending the session were interested in both ideas, but it quickly became apparent that the two ideas weren’t close enough to have in one conversation. A small group (David Morgen, Leeann Hunter, Raf Alvarado, and myself) broke off to try to tease out the TC Jr conundrum.

I had previously imagined TC Jr as a mini programming or digital humanities bootcamp. In a short week’s time, my kids would have the basics of programming down, better understand social media, and have their WordPress theme’s chosen. In between, we would throw Frisbees and work with LEGO Mindstorms. But when sitting down with people face-to-face rather than working solo and asynchronously in a GDoc, I was forced finally to articulate what it is that I would like for my children to get out of such an event. And in the end, what I think would be most valuable about TC Jr for my children is twofold.

First, they could use the chance to interact with other children of their same age. For a variety of reasons, some related to where we live in Atlanta, some related to where our extended family lives, and some related to nothing more than life playing out, our children don’t have many other children to play with. Bringing my kids to a one-time meetup with others certainly wouldn’t change their daily lives, but being able to spend 2-3 days with a lot of other kids could be transformative. Something like bringing a bunch of digital humanists together to one physical location.

But even more important than this interaction, what I think the real advantage of taking the THATCamp model to a group of kids is the self-generative nature of an unconference. THATCamps play out not according to the whims of a program committee but according to what the Campers want to do that very day and what they themselves bring to the table. And while I think it would be cool to teach my kids something about programming (maybe I could learn at the same time, right?), having an adult standing at the front of the room teaching them isn’t really what a THATCamp is all about. In some ways, perhaps, I need a TC Jr to help me loosen up and let the kids take the reins about what they would like to learn or make. Who knows what might come out of such an exchange?

Other children and self-directed experience, then, were my chief concerns. But those of us talking knew from our own THATCamp experience that some structure is necessary for an event to come off. So we started talking about activities that children could be in charge of and that their parents, aunts, or uncles could help them make a reality. Based on another secret, collaborative Google Doc (see above re:vaporware), David and I suggested the kids launching a website talking about music. But that seemed hard for a range of kids to be able to participate in. The next idea, which quickly gained traction, was making a movie. The kids could script it; they could film it using something simple like a Flip; they could make costumes out of whatever we had lying around. The adults could provide muscle and help with editing the footage together in iMovie and uploading it to YouTube or any other place the kids would like so they could show it off. And I took a solemn oath, right there outside CHNM, that I would add in as much terrible earthquake effects as the kids wanted. The advantage of making a movie tied in with one of David’s hopes for TC Jr: helping his children understand that they can be creators rather than just passive consumers.

Since THATCamp is about more hack than yak, we not only wanted to come up with a plan but to make sure the plan is carried through. Since three out of the four of us in the conversation were based in Atlanta, we are going to host TC Jr here, this summer; we’ll share the date as soon as we’ve finalized it. It might be a drive, but any and all are welcome to come and we can even try to help you find some place to stay.

Perhaps there’s space for a TC Jr that looks a lot more like a regular—if there can be such a thing—THATCamp or a bootcamp. Goodness knows, I learned plenty during Jeremy Boggs‘s, Amanda French‘s, and Tom Scheinfeldt‘s BootCamp sessions this year. But for now, I think the best model for TC Jr—or at least our TC Jr—is something closer to THATCamp Bay Area’s “THATCamp Project.” This is an experiment. We’ll be sharing what happens and look forward to your feedback!

**It’s worth saying that while I’m using the plural pronoun “we” throughout this post represents my take on the proceedings and that Raf, David, and Leeann share none of the guilt for my inability to write a succinct post. **

I’m about as late as can be in getting up my THATCamp session proposal. But I wanted to put it here for posterity as well:

At various times over the last year, there have been conversations about holding a THATCamp that was aimed at parents and kids. I know that we aren’t all parents, but for those of us who are, I’d be interested in having a session where we tease out what a THATCamp Junior would look like, whether it would be one event or joint local events, and how we can go about making it something real.

It’s been so long since this year’s MLA ended that you might wonder why I’m going to the trouble of posting my second talk. Hasn’t the moment passed? Does anyone care about what I said two months ago, even if you weren’t there? And considering the arguments that I make in this talk about social media being faster than regular scholarly communication, isn’t there some irony in my taking so long to get this up? So it goes.

I have a ream of excuses (from snow to THATCamp Southeast) for why I’m a bit behind the curve on posting this talk. But the reason I’m finally getting to it today is the Day of Digital Humanities (AKA #dayofDH). As I wrote in my first post this morning on my Day of DH blog, the digital humanities is not only about Digging into Data and distant reading but is also about the digital distribution of humanities scholarship. Hence, a long delayed blog post.

As I mentioned when summarizing my MLA, this talk was part of the “New Tools, Hard Times” panel, where I spoke alongside Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, and Chris Newfield. Meredith L. McGill moderated the session. Marilee organized the panel and was generous enough to invite me to play along. Marilee blogged her talk and Chris posted his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools.

The one thing that I wish I had done differently with my talk is change the title. Writing for ProfHacker has taught me the value of a title that promises discrete numbers. Your audience knows as they’re going in exactly how many data points you’ll be giving them. What’s more, there’s a suggestion that these data points will be something discrete, something that they can apply and use in the future. Those are some of the reasons why I chose the title I did. But personally, I found the title too similar to the talk I gave in Trinidad last October. It’s more than a little, however, likely that no one else pays enough attention to what I’m doing to notice the parallels. I attribute the lack of creativity in titles to how late I was up re-working on the talk the night before I gave it. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d call it “The Glass Tower: Social Media in the Academy in Hard Times.” But then I’ve gone ahead and committed the terrible sin of the colon-ized academic title. Perhaps it’s well enough as it is.

What follows is the text that I used when presenting. In a few places I ad-libbed, but you’re getting the gist here. And I’ve included the images that accompanied the text (images precede the text). In rare cases, you’re missing part of the dynamism of the transitions, and you’ll just have to consider that a good reason to see me give my next talk in person.

Three Reasons to Use Social Media in Hard Times

Good afternoon. I’m glad to be present today. You may have heard that I was unaccountably absent from last year’s MLA. Of course, if you’ve heard that—or have even heard of me—it’s largely due to the confluence of two trends: hard times in the academy and social media.

The hard times that the academy has been facing recently have been well documented, and unfortunately SUNY Albany is not so much a watershed as a disappointing continuation of a trend. While the number of positions advertised in the MLA’s Job Information List during the last academic year ended up being higher than Fall 2009 led us to believe [PDF], it remains true that most college classes are taught by people who are not on the tenure track. As Marc Bousquet has written about today’s job “market,” finishing one’s PhD is often the best way to make sure that one will never teach college again. My own difficulties with finding even an interview for a “proper” job is my dubious claim to fame and the reason I’m sharing a seat at this table with these more distinguished panelists.

At the same time that the academy has been going through furloughs, hiring and pay freezes, and the erosion of public and private funding, we have been discovering social media. We, like everyone else, use social media for managing networks of friendships. But academics increasingly use social media, both in their research and teaching: for example, a recent Chronicle article cited a survey that suggests more than 30% of faculty are using Twitter.

While this rise in social media is merely correlated with hard times in the academy, it’s still a relationship worth noting. My own, academic use of social media coincides neatly with my own hard times in the academy. I began blogging at the same time I began applying for jobs, in the fall of 2007; I started using Twitter shortly after returning from the 2007 MLA in Chicago; I built my own website in Spring 2008 and radically overhauled it as I was going on the job market for a third time in 2009.

As a whole, I believe many academics view social networking in the way the philologists probably viewed the new criticism: it’s new, it’s what younger scholars are doing, and, perhaps most damningly, it’s “not how things have been done.”

All of this is true, to an extent, and the university is an institution that prides itself on continuity and tradition. But given the hard times in the academy, I’m skeptical that we can hope for continuity. For good or ill, the university is a-changin’. So with that, I’d like to quickly touch on three reasons why hard times call for us to use social media:

It’s cheaper; it’s faster; and it’s more open.

It’s Cheaper

Although we don’t have money to meet with each other as often as we may have had in the past, we can use social media to help us communicate with one another even if we can’t attend. My own experience shows that this can still be effective. Not only did my own paper for last year’s MLA go viral on a small scale, but I was able to participate in other sessions remotely as people tweeted about what they were hearing or blogged their conference talks. I could ask questions in real time and have them relayed to the speaker in the conference rooms.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t have support to attend conferences or to be engaged in professional development. Indeed, we must assert that participation in these venues is necessary to being scholars. But even when money is not such a pressing issue, there are always more events than time. Social media helps us be in multiple places at once.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t have support to attend conferences or to be engaged in professional development. Indeed, we must assert that participation in these venues is necessary to being scholars. But even when money is not such a pressing issue, there are always more events than time. In the interest of time, however, I’ll just point you to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence.

It’s Faster

Speaking of journals, social networks are much more efficient at disseminating information and scholarly work. This is something you intuitively know if you’ve ever had a journal fall behind on their publication schedule once they’ve accepted one of our articles.

I had a great opportunity to observe a case study of the speed of social media this week in connection with the “Because” manifesto, which was written by a friend.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 4th, the first tweet about the manifesto went out. (It happened to be from me.)

Shortly after my first tweet is sent, people begin retweeting it. And some of them work for The Chronicle.

In retweeting, some people pull out excerpts that resonate with them.

Others comment on what the message says.

Some people offer suggestions for how the MLA could respond.

Another response on Twitter is that people start talking about how the post is “making the rounds.” This naturally gets more people reading it and spreading the post further.

Even AdjunctHulk weighs in.

Not everyone is going to give Paraphernalian a free pass.

And others don’t find that Paraphernalian speaks for his or her experience in the Academy.

Eventually I realize that I have to include this brief history in my talk, which I had already written.

And finally the post gets picked up by Inside Higher Ed. All of this in less than 24 hours.

Social media is fast enough to provide us and our work with a large audience—one that outstrips what we can normally expect from our publications. As Paraphernalian wrote to me privately, it’s “Weird that more ppl will read this than anything I wrote as an academic.”

It’s More Open

Too often the justifications made by state legislatures to cut funding is that no one is really sure what academics do with their time and money. Social media, then, can help those outside the academy understand what we do in higher education.

Suddenly the academy isn’t as shielded from the outside world. It’s no longer an ivory tower.

We’ve become much more like a glass tower. Or as Dan Cohen puts it in his forthcoming book, we move from an ivory tower to an open web. Helping people see how hard professors work is part of helping the academy when we’re in hard times.

Academics are not always especially good at sharing their work with other people. But I think that social media helps us get over that mistrust as we get to know each other better, through what Clive Thompson has called a “social sixth sense.” Social networks, in other words, help those of us inside the academy share our work and ideas, as well as our lives with one another.

Perhaps those who feel most disconnected from an academic community are the contingent labor among us. Even if you’re at a school that invests in you and cares about you, you might not have time to participate in your 9-to-5 academic community because you’re teaching too much or you’re on your way to the next school. The openness of social networks can allow the most disenfranchised among us to find community, then.

Perhaps my attitude about the importance of openness for the academy in hard times is cavalier, a function of my (relative) youth, inexperience, and lack of a tenure-track position. After all, it’s always important to be circumspect when communicating online. That being said, I have to admit that I’ve opted to be fairly open in my online interactions and that it’s had a salutary effect on my career. I’m speaking here now in large part because of it.

As such, if I may propose some questions for discussion, I’d ask how us to consider how we can advise graduate students in effectively using social networks in an academy which appears to be permanently facing hard times. And secondly, to return to the subject of publishing, to what degree should academic freedom be extended not only to the area of one’s research but also the mode/method in which that research is conducted and presented?

Like many others, I’m going to be participating in this year’s Day of Digital Humanities. It’s my first year doing so since last year’s Day coincided with a campus interview and it just didn’t seem kosher to write about what I was doing even though it was a digital humanities job.

The Day of DH team asks you to register to participate so that they can easily keep track of everyone who is taking part. Registration is not necessary (nor perhaps even in the spirit of some DH) and you can play along simply by using the #dayofDH hashtag on Twitter. One advantage of registering, however, was that the Day of DH team asked each participant to define “digital humanities.” I’ve read a number of people’s reflections on this subject, ranging from the brief (Dan Cohen’s) to the Venn-diagram powered (Alex Reid’s) to the provocative (Ian Bogost’s). All three of these are well worth your time, as is Chris Forster’s definition from a September 2010 HASTAC blog post.

Defining DH seems to be everyone’s favorite way to start an argument. I don’t know that anyone finds me worth arguing with, but for what it’s worth, here’s the definition that I submitted to the Day of DH planners:

When I’m asked, I like to say that digital humanities is just one method for doing humanistic inquiry.

Here is information that you will need to copy and paste for the THATCamp Southeast BootCamp session on “Visualizing Time and Space with Simile Widgets and Google.”

1. <script src=”http://api.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/2.2.0/exhibit-api.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
2. <script src=”http://api.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/2.2.0/extensions/time/time-extension.js”></script>
3. <link rel=”exhibit/data” type=”application/jsonp” href=”XXX?alt=json-in-script” ex:converter=”googleSpreadsheets” />
4. <div ex:role=”facet” ex:facetClass=”TextSearch” ex:facetLabel=”Search”></div> <div ex:role=”facet” ex:expression=”.eventType” ex:facetLabel=”Event Type”></div>
5. <div ex:role=”view” ex:viewClass=”Map” ex:label=”Map” ex:latlng=”.event_latlng” ex:center=”37.160317,-96.943359″ ex:zoom=”4″ ex:colorKey=”.eventRegion”>
6. <script src=”http://api.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/2.2.0/extensions/map/map-extension.js?gmapkey=ABQIAAAAnk4nR53Mr_8850J3Tzt5PhTlwb9r3oG55aIhhSpyljgpJTLIjhTLALkqpLQmbYoFUPuPhZU4QMXc8w”></script>

I can’t believe that we’re less than a week away from the beginning of THATCamp Southeast. In what shouldn’t be an all-too-surprising discovery, I’m learning that an unconference takes a lot more organizing than one would have thought. In any case, I recently posted my session idea for the Camp, and I wanted to cross-post it here for posterity.

Last summer I was fortunate enough to attend the NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab. Throughout the proceedings, I found myself watching my friend Jo Guldi madly switching between a number of different applications on her MacBook Pro. I wasn’t familiar with most of the tools she was using, and her work pattern for taking notes was so different from my own that I asked her abouit. Consequently, Jo, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, and myself sat down over lunch one day and started showing each other our personal favorite tools. (Note the absence of rimshot here, please.)

I found this exchange incredibly exciting and useful, not to mention very much in the spirit of ProfHacker, which I’ve had the great pleasure to write for since 2009. As much as you think you know about the tools of the trade, there’s always more out there. And maybe, just maybe, the things that your friends are using could help you get your writing / reading / compiling / programming done all that much more quickly.

What I’d like to propose for a session, then, is a show and tell. You get 3 minutes—at most—to show us your favorite application. You tell us what’s so great about it, how you use it in your work, and why you couldn’t live without it. We all get exposed to something new and get the chance to imagine how our own work could shift if we were to shake things up and try a new approach. If we have enough time (but how could we? people will be all over this session like butter on grits), you could get a shot to share a second favorite application with us. But seriously: don’t count on it.

It will work best if you can show us your application through the projector (we’ll have connections), but all platforms and applications are allowed. That means you can wax poetic about your favorite Android app. The best Chrome MAME. Or the best media player that you’ve found for Debian. Whatever you’d like. Heck, I suppose it could even be something analog! But you only get 3 minutes to share the love. Afterward, we’ll have a handful of new applications to try out (provided your pitch was good enough) and we’ll know who to talk to to find out more.

Does this sound appealing to anyone else?

One of the first things that I saw this morning was a tweet from Andrew Hazlett pointing to a Washington Post article by Philip Kennicott about the new Google Art Project. Art Project takes a “street view” approach to 17 art museums, allowing you to walk through some of their galleries and see the works as they are hung on the galleries’ walls. For those who are interested in how art is presented to and consumed by the public, this proves to be an invaluable resource (and shows how far we’ve come since the 2001, when Shelley Staples’s digital version of the 1913 Armory Show came online).

As I tweeted (part one and two), the line that I find most interesting in the coverage from the Post is this assertion from Julian Raby, the director of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington: “Far from eliminating the necessity of seeing artworks in person, Art Project deepens our desire to go in search of the real thing.” This passage naturally reminded me of the claims that Walter Benjamin makes in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In the essay, Benjamin considers the effect that photography, phonography, lithography, and more have on the “aura” or authenticity of an art work. In essence, a reproduction frees us from the need to go somewhere to see a particular piece of art, engaged in a pilgrimage of sorts; we no longer have to go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa: “…technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.” (As an aside, my public library in Nebraska, where I lived from ages 8-11, allowed you to check out framed reproductions. My brother’s and my favorite was the Mona Lisa. Ironically, we had seen the original when we lived in Europe. But I don’t think we had quite understood at the ages of 5 and 6 that it was something that mattered. Accordingly, we enjoyed our reproduction much more than the original.)

But Benjamin writes, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” So while we no longer need to go to art, the reproduction’s lack of place reinscribes the aura of the original. The result?

By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

So while it’s true that I no longer need to go to the MoMA to see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, seeing it in Google Art Project may very well strengthen my desire to see the original, which is what Raby and the other museum directors must be counting on. And of course, all that Art Project appears to show at the moment are works that are no longer in copyright. So if you want to see a Warhol or a LeWitt, you’ve still got to go to the MoMA itself.

While acknowledging the complicated co-dependent relationships of original and reproduction, Benjamin is clear that reproductions are better than originals in at least one concrete way:

…process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.

Mechanical reproductions, then, surpass the original by showing you more than your own eye could see, even if you were with the original. And it was precisely this issue of how much one can see in Art Project that our art history librarian, Kim Collins, asked me this morning when I showed her Art Project. After all, we pay a hefty subscription to ARTstor every year to get high quality images. So in the interest of seeing how much I could see, I pulled up The Starry Night (a work that I’ve never seen in person) in both ARTstor and Art Project. Using each platform, I zoomed in as far as I could on the church in the lower middle of the painting. And here is what I saw.

ARTstor (clicking on picture links to a larger version)

Google Art Project (clicking on picture links to a larger version)

That’s quite a difference in resolution and depth. Art Project is using what the Washington Post article calls a “‘gigapixel’ process, which stitches together multiple high-resolution images.” To get a sense of exactly how much more you see in Art Project, here, is the ARTstor image highlighted with the area that I’ve zoomed in on with Art Project:

Of course, the museums are the ones that provide the images to both ARTstor and Art Project, so there’s every chance in the world that the former’s images will be updated sometime in the future.

As I finish writing this, Art Project is a trending topic on Twitter. Although Google tends to have this effect on things, it’s apparent that people are interested in this project–or at least in talking about it. Towards the end of his essay, Benjamin writes, “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.” By throwing a tremendous quantity of pixels at Art Project, Google has produced something of quality that will shift how the masses see art.

And perhaps a key lesson to take from Art Project (if we can extract a lesson on launch day), is that it’s a clear demonstration of the opportunities that the digital humanities have to reach a larger audience, provided we can show them something new or something more in a (visual) language they understand.

As you might have intuited from a previous post, I had the opportunity to attend the recent 2011 MLA Convention in Los Angeles. One of the panels that I spoke on was organized by Jason B. Jones and featured a trio of the ProfHacker team on the theme of “Hacking the Profession: Academic Self-Help in an Age of Crisis.” Here’s the description of session #48 from the official MLA program: “This roundtable discusses how we narrate our academic lives online, whether in blogs or on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or in any other format. In particular, we are interested in how we talk about failure or, more gently, about the common problems that plague any academic life: the class that doesn’t quite work, the committee that’s driving us crazy, or the article that can’t quite find a home.”

To insure that we had plenty of time left for discussion, we decided to practice what we preach and give our talks in the Pecha Kucha format (AKA 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide). This was my first time giving a talk in this style, and I found it a very interesting exercise. Often I write my talks and only come to the images later, but I found that I had to work on both simultaneously since the slides would determine where I would be in the moment of my argument. I also discovered that in 20 seconds I can say at most 4 lines of 12-point Times New Roman text. I liked the whole approach well enough that I’ll definitely include a Pecha Kucha presentation the next time I teach.

What follows is the text that I cribbed from when presenting at the MLA. In a few places I ad-libbed, especially on the first slide. But you’re getting the gist here. And I’ve included the images that accompanied the text (images precede the text). Make sure you don’t miss Natalie M. Houston’s talk from the same session on “Happiness Hacking.”

Dr. ProfHacker, or How I L3rn3d to St0p Worry1ng and <3 teh fail!!1!

Title, introduce myself.

Admit to this being my first time doing Pecha Kucha.

The problem of the academy, especially the humanities, is that we’ve been too easily waylaid by the ideal of the romantic genius. We think we need to be like the people we study. That we as scholars must be solo geniuses. And we believe that genius scholars never have problems…or failures.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Failure is a common human experience. As little as academics seem like humans at times, then, we need to plan on having failures. And we shouldn’t consider it unusual or untoward. Some academics have become better than others at this.

In a 2007 article in Wired, Thomas Goetz considered the problem of “dark data,” information that is abandoned since it doesn’t conform to hypotheses or doesn’t yield a dramatic enough outcome for a high-profile publication. Reporting on failures is valuable, writes Goetz, because “your dead end may be another scientist’s missing link, the elusive chunk of data they needed” (Goetz).

A possible solution to this problem is the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, which, Goetz notes, “has offered a peer-reviewed home to results that go negative or against the grain” since 2002. Since that same year, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, reports on “experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels…[t]hus, reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological literature” (JASNH website).

These two journals play an important role for their particular fields by making “failure” public. Perhaps the idea of publishing unsuccessful research is not applicable to every field. But while we do not yet have a Failed Lacanian Interventions Quarterly, many academics are talking about failures in their professional lives as a whole. These discussions about research, teaching, and service take place on blogs, on wikis, and on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

The advantage of discussing our failures in public is that we can get help from other people. As an example, in Spring 2010 I taught a senior-level seminar. I’d taught the class once before and it had been really successful. Last January, I found myself in a classroom setting where I couldn’t get the students to talk to me. In a discussion-based class, it was obvious that I was failing.

My frustration with the situation resulted in my trying several different in-class activities. But at the same time, I wrote online about the difficulty of the experience that I was having. (You’ll notice from the tenor of these tweets that I was more caught up in the notion of my own genius rather than noticing that I was failing my class.)

Meeting with the director of undergraduate studies and asking him for help was useful, but so too was the response I received from my network of colleagues who had had similar experiences in the past. In particular, Erin Templeton saw my plaint and wrote a ProfHacker post about how silence is golden…until it isn’t.

Erin’s post begins by recounting her own “failure” in getting a class to talk and what steps she took to both get her students talking and in coming to terms with what she could not change. Among other things, she suggested methods that she had learned from other academics public narratives. (You’ll notice a virtuous circle happening where one person narrates publicly and others get the benefit.)

I never did get that class talking as much as I had hoped to, but narrating my experiences and asking for help online—rather than staying locked in my ivory tower—improved not only the class’s interactions, but also my own abilities as a teacher. ProfHacker became, in a sense, a Journal of Negative Results.

At the risk of patting ourselves too much on the backs, however, I’d like to suggest that ProfHacker and the work of others like Tenured Radical, Dean Dad, Sisyphus, and many more expose a different sort of failure: the general failure of the academy to make plain many of its most regular practices, from mentoring to writing letters of recommendation.

Narrating our lives need not only be about personal failures, then, but a desire to correct the failures of the academy to make its customs navigable to those who are new. By discussing how the academy works—even when it isn’t working so well in its present circumstances of “hard times”—we provide opportunities to diversify who can be successful in the profession.

There are increasing numbers of academic self-help books. Many of these are really useful, from Donald E. Hall to Kathryn Hume to The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career. But these books are limited in being from only one point of view. The advantage of narrating your academic life publicly is that you can hear from a wide range of interlocutors.

It’s this wide range of interlocutors that makes a university interesting. Large groups of creative and interesting people working together are also what author Steven Johnson suggests is responsible for innovation. In other words, Johnson’s book argues against the model of the solitary genius, against the idea that one person can repeatedly create something ex nihilo.

The advantage of narrating your life online, failures included, is that whether you are at a large research institution or not, you can participate in large group conversations that not only inform but also create, such as the real-time, crowdsourced publication Digital Humanities Now or the comment threads at ProfHacker.

Now, it might seem problematic to be narrating our personal and institutional failures when the academy is facing such hard times. After all, how can we expect state legislatures or individuals to continue funding our campuses if they are aware that we fail at times?

Contrary to expectations, however, I think that showing our failings might make us more sympathetic to those outside of academia. Instead of being the romantic geniuses in our ivory tower, we start to look a little bit human. And humans and human experience is what lies at the heart of the university.

In 2009, Google made a splash when it announced Wave. In 2010, Google made a splash when it announced that it was going to kill Wave. If you’d ever used Wave, this probably came as no surprise. I believe there’s a lesson that we can learn from Google, however. Admit our failures—including the academy’s—and do so quickly. Then talk about them.

Thanks.

Last year I gained some attention for not attending the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. The notice that was paid to my situation and to the paper that was read on my behalf took me completely by surprise. That feeling of surprise persisted throughout 2010 as people occasionally sent emails or told me at events that they had heard of me. Standing in for the present absence [paywall] of many contingent or non-tenure-track at the yearly meeting of the MLA—and all the other conferences or department and faculty meetings—was not what I had had in mind when I stayed home. But I’m grateful that my paper resulted in increased attention being paid to the effects of labor casualization in the university.

Because I’m lucky, I have a job now. And because I’m even luckier, I’ve just finished attending my fifth MLA convention, where I spoke on two panels. I say “my” MLA with good reason. Previous to the 2006 MLA Convention, I’d heard that the yearly meeting wasn’t especially enjoyable: people only went for the job interviews; the presenters always took too long and there was never time for Q&A; the lobby was full of the dead gazes of nervous candidates; and conversations were stunted by the sizing up of one other’s badges—their names and affiliations. So I was stunned when I got to Philadelphia, where I was slated to give a paper. For three days straight, there was something fascinating and fabulous happening. Every hour of the day there was something that I wanted to attend. I saw Michael Bérubé and Bitch PhD (RIP) speak about their blogging. I saw Dave Parry (although I didn’t know him at the time) and others talk about the Wikipedia. I attended talks about the authors I was writing about in my dissertation and talks given by friends in my program. I met Katherine Hayles, someone whose work intrigued me and who chaired the panel that I spoke on. I bumped into one of my favorite undergraduate professors in the book exhibit and caught up on the last 4.5 years. I hung out with friends from grad school, met scads of new people, and ate one of the best meals of my life. What had been billed as a soulless gathering at a terribly inconvenient time of year turned out to be quite possibly the most interesting three days of my academic career to that point.

I was hooked. I planned to go back to the MLA the following year since I would be on the market for the first time. But I was very much looking forward to it. In Chicago in 2007, I had two interviews, but I went for the fun of it all. I met Matt Kirschenbaum and Joe Tabbi for the first time, the latter offering me the opportunity to work some on electronic book review and the ELO Directory. I caught up with Jason Jones and his family. I ate a montecristo. In 2008, I hit San Francisco with one job interview, but I was also moderating a panel on Twitter with Dave Parry, Matt Gold, and John M. Jones. The first MLA tweetups took place, and I met so many people whom I had come to know online that listing them would verge on the obnoxious. And the work of my peers continued to keep me rushing from one hotel to the next, as I tried to decide between incredible When I decided not to attend the 2009 convention, then, I was as disappointed by my missing out on what I suspected would be both a great intellectual feast and a fabulous party.

Although any notoriety I was enjoying in March 2010 had come my way primarily by my not attending the conference, I knew that I could pull a(n accidental) stunt like that once. So I began submitting paper proposals with the hope that I could speak in this year’s program. Others kindly invited me to participate in round tables that they were organizing. And after Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, wrote to threaten (in a tongue-in-cheek manner) to not accept my panels unless I showed her an airplane receipt guaranteeing I would be at the 2011 convention, I learned that I would have the chance to speak on two different panels. I’ll blog the talks from those panels in a day or so, but I wanted to quickly recap some of what my MLA looked like this year–to the best that I can recall, at least.

Thursday

• On arriving at the JW Marriott on Thursday morning, I found myself riding on an escalator behind someone who looked very familiar. He seemed to have noticed me and was looking quizzically at me as well. Neither of us had yet found name tag holders. Right before I could speak, he turned fully to me and said, “Excuse me, are you Brian Croxall? I’m Michael Bérubé.” This is not how you expect your conversation to go with the Second Vice President of the MLA. He was very kind and asked about my new job.
• I started Thursday with some media training that I and approximately 20 other people (including many ProfHackers had been invited to. Rosemary Feal and Mark Aurigemma provided two hours of helpful and revealing strategies for how faculty can effectively interact with journalists. Expect a ProfHacker post soon on the subject from myself or one of my colleagues.
• For the very first session of the MLA, I attended a panel on labor in the digital humanities (DH), which featured Tanya Clement, Mark Childs, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Amanda French, Carl Stahmer, with William Thompson presiding. The conversations ranged from debating the extent to which non-programmers can really expect to learn code well enough to contribute to a project (Carl said no), to the degradation of digital humanities projects due to the evaporation of labor after a grant ends, to Amanda French’s commonsense (and therefore all the more radical) suggestion that funds from grants be used in part to fund the training of graduate students so they can learn basic programming concepts and therefore become more able to communicate with their DH collaborators. Tanya Clement even read a portion of the whitepaper that she and Doug Reside have been preparing for the upcoming, NEH-funded Off the Tracks meeting that seeks to limn out pathways for DH scholar-programmers (their term, which she pointed out is contentious). At the end of this panel, I was very happy to get to meet Richard Grusin for the first time. His (and Jay David Bolter’s) book Remediation had a profound effect on my dissertation. This, by the way, is what’s cool about the MLA, in case you missed it.
• Directly after this panel, Natalie M. Houston, Jason Jones, George Williams, and myself got to speak about hacking the profession on a ProfHacker-organized and -themed panel. Natalie’s posted her talk, and I’ll put mine up shortly. I really enjoyed the Q&A, which featured tales of poems about burritos and George regaling us with his boxing days. In this panel, I got to meet Kathy Harris for the first time—someone with whom I was able to collaborate a bit on a timeline— and Bill “Thomas H. Benton” Pannapacker, who wrote a blog post on The Chronicle of Higher Education about the panel.
• Following a one-panel interlude where I’m afraid I zoned out more than anything, having hit a wall, I had my second (and final) speaking engagement. The “New Tools, Hard Times” panel featured Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, Chris Newfield, and myself talking about the use of social media in the academy in hard times. I will simply say that I was floored to be on this panel with these people. My talk is forthcoming, but Marilee has posted hers and Chris has already blogged his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools. During Q&A we were all happy that questions were coming in from people who were not at the convention and were asking about issues of anonymity in the academy. Perhaps the best question came from Matt Kirschenbaum who wondered whether work in social media was actually counterproductive at a point as it too often ends up being uncounted by the academy. This is a good question to keep in mind, but I appreciate the fact that my being presently off the tenure track means that I don’t have to worry as much about whether my contributions online count. Or in other words, while I haven’t grabbed the brass ring of the tenure-track job, I do get to exercise a tremendous amount of freedom in how I spend my energies and time. It’s kind of ironic, then, that I have some academic freedom that the tenured and especially the tenure-track faculty lack.
• At this point, I hit a wall, but had a fabulous dinner—and even better conversation—at Cork Bar.
  This was eventually followed by some night caps (orange juice for me!) with friends. And Rosemary Feal introduced me to Gerald Graff.

Friday

• Friday morning started early with a show-and-tell round table of new digital projects. As I tweeted, I was most taken in by some of the new visualizations (still in beta, unfortunately) that John Walsh of The Swinburne Project demonstrated and “For Better For Verse,” an interactive tool for teaching scansion and prosody, which is headed up by Herbert Tucker of UVa. Then I got a personal tutorial on NINES and 18thConnect from Laura Mandell.
• I then took in a panel where Ryan Cordell presented on his work on Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” Ryan’s work is fascinating, but even more was his ability to present effectively. He really taught the audience about his work, rather than reading directly from the page. He made it plain that even more traditional talks can be shifted from what is supposed to be the norm at the MLA. I hope that Rosemary Feal really does ask him to do a video about effective presentations.
• I then hurried over to the book exhibit. It’s always fascinating to see what new books are coming out (not to mention how much money I can save). But the real draw this year was the Narrating Lives project, which participated in the larger theme of the conference established by MLA President Sidonie Smith. There wasn’t a line when I arrived, so I was quickly briefed and waivered, and I recorded a one-minute video that talked about why I look forward to the yearly MLA and what made me go to graduate school in literature and language.
  
  
  (You can tell from my presentation that the media training hadn’t quite sunk in yet.) All in all, I’m really excited that the MLA is looking for such user-generated content. And I’m even more thrilled that Kathi Berens recorded two videos along the theme of “It Gets Better,” talking to those—like her— that are not on the tenure track.
• Next on the schedule was a session on “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities,” which featured Kathy Harris, Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, Steve Ramsay, and Bethany Nowviskie (who, due to illness, was channeled by Steve), and Brett Bobley of the NEH, with Kathleen Fitzpatrick chairing (all links are to either the speaker’s blogged talk or to their Twitter account). The speakers each had about 3 minutes to present their perspective on the Digital Humanities. Perhaps most electric was Steve’s polemic (which appears to be his public persona and one which he performs exceptionally) in which he considered “Who’s In an Who’s Out,” a subject that seems to come up frequently in DH. He suggested that knowing how to code is all but required in DH and presented a definition of DH: it’s “about building things.” Steve has blogged his reflections on the panel, and they’re worth reading. Personally, I very much like his definition of building as requisite to DH. I’d suggest that it doesn’t have to be limited to one’s research, however, since I think DH can happen in pedagogy just as well as research. (See Chris Forster on this important point.) But during the discussion, Alan Liu argued that he’s not so much a builder as someone who steals or is a bricoleur, and I think that that’s possibly closer to my vision of myself than one of a builder. It was a very good conversation, but one that I also felt I’ve heard a lot recently, either in person or in the blogosphere about just what DH is. In the end, I wonder to what extent these questions really come down to wondering about how we should train the current generation of graduate students. After all, if we are to prepare people for DH positions, we need to make sure they will be able to have the skills that programs will be looking for. But I don’t know if we’ll ever get as specific in training as we are in breadth requirements for PhDs. The current (and previous) generation of DH practitioners seem to all have taken idiosyncratic paths, and that’s one of the things that makes the community vibrant. I’d hate to lose that (although I recognize that not everyone has the time or opportunity to pursue these paths). Perhaps this is why we keep talking about it. If you want to see more of the conversation, look at the archive for the hashtag #309. One of the things that I found most interesting about this panel was how packed the room was: standing room only, and it was clear that there were a lot of people there who simply wanted to learn about what the digital humanities were. Due to all reports I saw from last year’s MLA, the digital humanities sessions in 2009 were also packed, but were in much smaller rooms. This year saw DH given larger space, but it still wasn’t sufficient. I saw MLA staffers counting attendance during this session, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll see still bigger rooms in 2012.
• After the DH History and Future panel, I stayed put for a session on “The Open Professoriate” (Twitter hashtag #openprof) featuring Samuel Cohen, Amanda French, Dave Parry, Mark Sample, and Erin Templeton, with Matt Gold chairing. At the moment, only Amanda has blogged her talk, but I am sure that we’ll see more of the talks made available soon given that the openness of faculty’s research, teaching, and lives was the subject of the day. The Q&A was again very lively, and I asked the panel to what extent we should count on large corporations such as Google or Twitter to have our interests of openness at heart. It’s not that they are necessarily more or less profit-driven than the universities most of us work for, but I think that many of us—myself certainly included—forget to consider that we are creating value for the web companies that we contribute to with our searches and discussions. Not that this makes me want to be less open; after all, I’d rather have accessibility. But we need to be aware of everyone with whom we’re consorting in the quest toward openness. I was glad to see the MLA embrace conversations suh as these as well as the standard literary discussions.
• I stuck to the same room for one more talk, and got to hear Stanford’s Dan Edelstein talk about the mapping of Enlightenment correspondence in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. The visualizations and the patterns they have been discovering by building a massive archive of early modern correspondence is intriguing and brought the conversation from the meta level of the #309 panel back to the practical. Fascinating work and well worth following.
• Following Dan’s talk, I moved to the Electronic Literature Organization‘s meetup, where I caught up with Zach Whalen and Kari Kraus and met Jentery Sayers and Mark C. Marino for the first time. Again, one of the reasons to attend the MLA in my experience is that everyone is there. And even if you don’t get a lot of time to talk to everyone, simply seeing each other in person helps to make possible new chances for working together or learning about what’s at the bleeding edge of different fields.
• After a DH-filled dinner of sushi, the final event of the evening was the MLA Tweetup, which Rosemary Feal sponsored. While it will likely not get the press coverage that 2009′s did, it was still nice to see in person many of the people whose tweets we had been reading throughout the first two days of the conference. I’m sure not everyone there was someone that was on Twitter, since it appeared to include some bleed over from the audience for President Sidonie Smith’s keynote address. Still, it was amazing to see so many people there, who were engaged in the Twitter side of the MLA. And the ambience was something to behold:
  

Saturday

• For my final experience of the MLA, I joined the fun run that Dave Parry had organized for as many MLA participants as were crazy enough to be consider spandex and black turtlenecks at 7am.
  
  Dave and the others at the front of the pack took pity on us and kept it manageable. Fortunately, I had a strategy.
  
  As was the case throughout so much of the MLA this year, it was great to have Rosemary Feal involved. She mentioned before the run how much she appreciated that the run got organized. At the risk of putting words in her mouth, I think she was pleased to see young blood at the MLA. But I also imagine that she enjoys seeing spontaneous organizing taking place: the activities of the underconference.

I don’t want to come off saying that there aren’t any problems at the MLA. There are things that I think can be fixed at the MLA. For one, it would be great to find ways to get those presenting in traditional panel formats (not everything can be pecha kucha, after all) could present rather than read directly from the page. After all, we’re all teachers. Why do we think that we need to communicate to one another in a different mode than we communicate to our students? Second, I think that the MLA can do more to embrace openness. In particular, the MLA should avoid paywalling information related to the conference, such as the program. Part of this trouble is due to the program being published as an issue of PMLA. But it shouldn’t fall to the crowd to hack and republish the simple PDF. If we are in hard times (and boy are we!), then we should be doing everything to make information about ourselves public. How can we expect people to understand what it is that we do in this profession if we don’t let them see what it is we’re discussing? (See Kathi Berens calling for the same openness on her blog.) But these problems are things that we can fix. They aren’t impossible. And on the whole, I’m feeling quite positive about the direction the organization is headed in.

I know that some people think the MLA is stodgy, solipsistic, and stressful. But that’s not my MLA. And I’m glad I was present.

EDITS: Added the photo at the Cork Bar, courtesy of Kathi Berens.