Net Life Archives
April 16, 2010
Posted at 5:02 PM in Net Life
Counting this entry, I have managed to turn up on four blogs this week. I've been guest-blogging at Bookslut, which I always get a kick out of. Bookslut ought to be part of your regular lit-net rounds if it's not already.
For the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog, I wrote about "Collector in Chief," a new blog launched by AOTUS, a k a David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. His call for "citizen archivists" to get involved in helping the Archives do its work provoked some interesting reax over at ArchivesNext, a site that's well worth keeping an eye on if you groove on archives. (And who doesn't?) On Wired Campus I also noted the kinda mind-bending news that the Library of Congress will archive every public tweet every sent forth on Twitter since it went live in March 2006. That, too, provoked some fascinating commentary around the Twitterverse and blogosphere and even in the old MSM about the wisdom and risks of the move. When I have time, I'll compile a roundup of the better posts/articles I've seen on the topic.
And--ta da--the Chronicle debuted its blog on scholarly publishing today. Called PageView, it will have posts by yours truly and several other book-loving Chronicle folk, so please swing by and take a look.
Fiction-writing got a little lost in the shuffle this week, but I did get good news on the fiction front. The Smoking Poet will publish some short fiction of mine in its summer issue. I'll post that link when I have it.
Shameless plea: If you don't already follow me on Twitter (@JenHoward), I'd love it if you would. When I have 1K followers, I get to drink beer on the roof with my colleagues, and it's getting to be that season in DC when it is very pleasant to do things like that. So help me out, because beer really does taste better when you drink it on the roof (safely--safety first, always).
February 15, 2010
Posted at 10:37 AM in Net Life
My adventures in podcasting continue. First, I joined Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt on their "Digital Campus" podcast (Episode 51, "The Inevitable iPad," Jan. 28, 2010). We recorded the podcast the day after Apple's big iPad announcement, so we talked a lot about what the iPad might or might not do for teaching and publishing. We also dug into Cornell's decision to ask other institutions to help pay for arXiv, the repository where physicists, computer scientists, and others in related disciplines share pre-print copies of articles about the latest research in their fields.
Side note: If you care at all about the digital humanities--and why wouldn't you?--you should be following Dan and Tom on Twitter (@dancohen and @foundhistory). Mills doesn't do Twitter, but you can follow him at his blog, Edwired (linked above).
Second, The Collagist posted a podcast of me reading my short fictions "Twenty Questions," "It's Me," and "It's You" from the December issue. I love that the mag asks writers to do this. Not only do the recordings give readers another way to experience stories, they give the writer a chance to play with how the words fit together, where the emotional stresses and emphases are. I liked thinking about how much to act out the stories in how I read them, and how much to let the words alone carry. Hope you enjoy it. I had fun making it.
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Another side note: Matt Bell, the amazingly energetic and talented editor of The Collagist, just had his story "Dredge" chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2010. The collection will be out this fall, which is also when his next book, How They Were Found, will appear.
November 12, 2009
Posted at 10:35 AM in Net Life
I'm a guest on this week's installment of Digital Campus, a podcast hosted by Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The episode's theme is "Publishers Bleakly", and Dan, Mills, Tom, Josh Greenberg of the NYPL and I talk about some of the changes besetting (or reshaping) scholarly publishers and libraries. If you listen, I hope you find it useful. And if I said anything I'll regret, don't tell me.
June 3, 2009
Posted at 10:56 AM in Net Life
1. You're hungry.
2. You're sleepy.
3. You have figured out what you're having for dinner.
4. You haven't figured out what you're having for dinner.
5. You've read an article that every third person online has already read/blogged about/tweeted.
6. Your email/ISP/Web site/smartphone is giving you trouble.
7. It is raining where you are.
8. It has stopped raining where you are.
9. You're getting a lot done!
10. You really could be getting more done.
If you can point me toward a conversation, an article, a book or an idea I'm not likely to see otherwise, though, I will follow you to the ends of the Internet. A good old-fashioned laugh is always welcome, too.
May 27, 2009
Posted at 8:34 PM in Net Life
FYI, you can also find me on Twitter now (@JenHoward). I am not, repeat not, @DrJennifer, "licensed psychotherapist, author, personal development expert, relationship counselor, Integrated Energy Healer, and spiritual teacher." If you want to talk writing, publishing, literature, history, libraries, or archives, though, I'm your gal. When I get the integrated-energy thing down, I'll let you know.
April 22, 2009
Posted at 8:41 AM in Net Life
I have been wishing, lately, that there was a way to social-network without other people--or, perhaps more accurately, without drowning in their pet peeves, predilections, passions, and punch lines. Online, they have become inescapable. No man is an island on Facebook. That's the point, right? You never have to be alone again. Blogging begins to seem like a solitary activity.
What began for me as a sort of professional ADD--got to check this site, read that listserv--has metastasized into something more pervasive. Have I checked my Twitter feed this morning? My Facebook page? My LinkedIn profile? How much time will I have to spend explaining that creatively cryptic status update to the well-meaning friend whose grasp of irony or sarcasm is even less sure in a virtual context than it was back when we were in school together way back when?
It has me tired out. It makes me feel that instead of really connecting with other people, I just spend more time now explaining what I mean (in every sense). As if it mattered, when I could be finishing that article, working on that book proposal, getting that piece of fiction off the ground, or just looking out the window.
And yet--could I unplug? Do I have the willpower? What would I miss? I know I'm not alone.
November 7, 2008
Posted at 10:04 AM in Net Life
The London incarnation of the Institute for the Future of the Book, or if:book as it likes to be known, is hosting a virtual group read of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Seven female critics and creative writers will read the novel, jot down notes in the virtual margins, and discuss it all in a group blog. Other readers will be able to read the novel online and weigh in via a public forum on the site.
I did a quick take on the project for the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog. This bit from Bob Stein, if:book's co-director, is what really caught my eye:
Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.
October 30, 2008
Posted at 1:49 PM in Net Life
Harvard University says it won't participate in Google Book Search for in-copyright works under the terms of the just-announced legal settlement. Why? It's all about access. Harvard also says it may change its mind as the settlement evolves.
I had a feeling we would be seeing some pushback before long. Who's next?
October 20, 2008
Posted at 6:57 AM in Net Life
I'm making up for light posting here lately by guest-blogging over at Bookslut this week. Come on over and check it out. Feel free to send literary tidbits my way, too.
August 14, 2008
Posted at 8:17 AM in Lit Critin Net Life
Not long ago, I wrote a story for the Chronicle Review on "literary geospaces," profiling two digital humanists who are using technologies like Google Earth to see literary history in fresh ways. One of the scholars I wrote about, Matthew Jockers of Stanford, has posted more about his work on his blog, describing the bigger picture--
As long ago as 1997, my research had shown that the Irish experience in America was largely determined by place. It's true, of course, that the time of immigration to the U.S. was important in coloring the Irish experience: were these pre-famine immigrants, famine refugees, or the 1980's so-called "commuter Irish." But I discovered that equally important to chronology was place and the business of where the immigrants settled. For my research, I divided the country up into a number of regions (Midwest, mountain, southwest, pacific. . .) and each one of these regions turned out to have a distinct "brand" of Irish-American writing. Generally speaking, though, the further west we go the more likely we are to find writers describing the Irish-American experience in positive terms.
--and how he built a bibliographic database of IA lit that he turned into a "Google Earth mash-up." You can catch a QuickTime video of the mash-up here.
February 29, 2008
Posted at 11:14 AM in Net Life
My latest story for the Chronicle looks at lessons learned from Gutenberg-e, the high-profile digital-history monograph series created by Columbia University Press and the Columbia Libraries in collaboration with the American Historical Association. It has quietly added an open-access option. It has also switched its subscription model from in-house to the Humanities E-Book project run by the American Council of Learned Societies.
The bottom line? Well--surprise--digital publishing isn't necessarily cheaper than the old-fashioned kind. What you save in printing and binding and warehousing, at least with a project as sophisticated as Gutenberg-e, you may lose in extra labor-and-tech costs. "We discovered that online is not cheaper," one person close to the project told me.
And open access? Many welcome it, for obvious reasons. But publishers struggle with the worry that--to borrow a phrase I heard recently--it will make them "audience rich and cash poor."
Cathy Davidson wrestles with all these questions over at her HASTAC blog Cat in the Stack. You can read the AHA's take on the evolving Gutenberg-e experiment here, and a research librarian's reaction here.
February 15, 2008
Posted at 11:19 AM in Net Life
Librarians get their own web series, "Erik the Librarian," courtesy of "The Office" scribe Brent Forrester. Speak Quietly has the skinny and a clip. Worth the three minutes and 25 seconds of your life that you will spend watching it.
(Link via LIS News.)
February 13, 2008
Posted at 12:30 PM in Net Life
Over at Print Is Dead, Jeffrey Gomez has posted a report from this week's O'Reilly Tools of Change confab NYC. Depending on how devoted you are to the idea of the solitary writer/reader, you will find it either bracing or alarming.
According to Gomez, one panelist, Stephen Abram, talked about how Wiki-style creation (context, in other words) has displaced the idea of content. Another, Douglas Rushkoff, took it a step further:
Rushkoff's idea is that the main point of content is to offer people the opportunity to socialize. And it's that socializing, or socialization, that's the real point; it's the contact that's important, not the content in and of itself. He summed up his point by saying that "Content is an excuse for people to interact."
Wow. So why do I feel so wonderfully alone when I write? Isn't that necessary, at least to a certain kind of (grad-jive alert here) "literary production"? If I just wanted to socialize, I'd throw a dinner party. Then again, unless you're Emily Dickinson (and maybe not even then), a writer wants some answer back from the vasty deep (or the frozen expanse of cyberspace).
February 8, 2008
Posted at 10:23 PM in Net Life
Is it? Is it "almost like ESP," Wired?
