This is the image produced by ‘wordle‘ when I had it run my entire manuscript. Pretty humbling. After the ASA meetings, where I described my research dozens of times, I perhaps should have just passed out copies of this image. (I don’t know why it’s shaped like New York State.)
Addendum: Interestingly, The Boston Globe offers up a similar analysis of the two presidential candidates’ blogs.
Work on good prose has three steps, a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
-Walter Benjamin
I am always looking to be a better writer and speaker, and some would say I need to work on it more than I do. In keeping with White, here’s Vonnegut’s ‘How to Write With Style‘ and Sociologist Jim Jasper’s ‘Learning How to Write Better.’ ‘Style’ is such an interesting issue… When I worked with Jim we would sit around in a circle and play his ‘Word Elimination Game,’ a game I have been playing on my manuscript this summer. Same with the ‘Reverse Outline.’ More advice:
There is the obsessive use of logical connectors, like “however,” or “thus.” If the relationship between two successive sentences isn’t clear without these, from their internal substance, you’re already in trouble. (I could have said, “then you’re already in trouble,” or “thus you’re already in trouble.”) There are also phrases that mean nothing at all, like “In this regard”…
Guilty as charged.
Here is Jim’s ‘Giving Better Talks‘ too. He obliquely mentions the use of Memory Palaces, or ‘Method of Loci,’ which I’ve tried to teach a bit in class but rarely use…
If you read this (again, I’m surprised when I see that people do seem to stop by here) and are a ‘blogger’ yourself, why not head over to Kristina Barnett’s website and share with her your blog experiences? She’s a real gem, and not just for introducing me to avocado margaritas: she has the bona fides for a great research project.
One of the highlights of my graduate career at CUNY was learning Capital with David Harvey. It was a page by page, reading, and I used a great deal of what I learned in my Foundations of Social Theory class last term. He has been teaching Volume One for forty years, and now anyone can have the privledge. Find all 13 two hour lectures here. (I would include something pithy and insightful here, but my notes are a few hundred miles away right now…)
I’ve been lucky enough to have taught at CUNY and Smith, two places that are very committed to economic inequality. My dad and I just had an interesting conversation about Smith and a place called Berea College this weekend, and it didn’t take long for me to find a new piece from The Chronicle, via a Slate post called ‘What Would Smith Do?’:
Pell Grant recipients account for a quarter of the undergraduates at Florida State University and Smith College, for 35.2 percent at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for 77.4 percent at Berea College, which makes educating the neediest students its mission.
My dad brought me to Berea when I was a teenager, and I have wanted to return at some point. I think that nothing would make him happier for me to teach there. (There’s also a recent New York Times piece on the ‘Ivy League Letdown.’)
Q: Do they teach about degradation ceremonies in journalism school?
A: No.
Q: Was I clear that Goffman used the term, but that it’s from Harold Garfinkel?
A: Not enough.
Working on a new set of ideas around urban re-enchantment, I came across this quote:
I accept no responsibility for statistics, which are a form of magic beyond my comprehension. -Robertson Davies
Save for having read and enjoyed the Deptford Trilogy (and his fabulous presentation of self) as any good canadaphile would, I have no other comment. The band, The Magic Numbers, is here.
… or me. I hate having to think about clothes, particularly ‘teaching clothes.’ It occupies my mind very intensely every morning from 7:05-7:07, and it is enough to make me wish I could just wear a monk’s robe to work every day. Well, at least I’m not alone. Someone argues that academics should be more dressed up, a kind of ‘broken windows’ theory of academic attire, I suppose. Then two people respond here and here. No mention of those expectations as being heavily gendered, by the way. Yes, this is perhaps irrelevant. But perhaps I’ll wear a suit tomorrow and see what happens.
A Hunter College course was sponsored by the IACC (International Anti-Counterfeiting Commission)–“world’s largest non-profit organization devoted solely to protecting intellectual property and deterring counterfeiting”–wherein students were assigned to design a guerrilla marketing campaign against, you guessed it, counterfeit products. One of the things they did was a blog, which was written by a fictional ‘Heidi Cee.’
Some question why a for-credit college class at a public university should be doing, in effect, discount marketing work for an industry group. Some wonder about a college using some students to fool other students. Others are concerned about the circumstances of the course itself. It was created without any curricular review. The professor who taught it says that he was pressured to do so even though he has no expertise in advertising or public relations (he teaches computer graphics) and had ethical qualms about the course.
Further, the professor — and other professors who have investigated the circumstances of the course — maintain that the professor was required to teach only one side of the issue, had to accept industry officials watching him teach, and had little clout to fight back since he didn’t (and still doesn’t) have tenure.
Read more here.
Save for watching Time Bandits, I almost never think about ‘the future.’ But I was reading danah boyd’s piece on ‘blogging outloud’ wherein she asks:
Although they do exist, very few blogs are about culling knowledge into an archival form. But this does not make them worthless. Why do libraries keep letters from the 18th century? Historical artifacts tell us about the people who lived at a particular time.
Which got me thinking about the ways in which blogs serve as semi-permanent documents of ephemeral thoughts of a certain kind of person. I wouldn’t say ‘the masses,’ but 112 million blogs isn’t exactly chump change either. Reading Natalie Zemon Davis’ ‘Printing and the People‘ and how New Cultural Historians had to come up with creative ways to understand the oral and written culture of the masses in the 16th Century (e.g., death certificates, etc.), I began thinking about the record that may be left behind from today forward… And as Google seeks to cataloge any data it can find, I certainly meditate on the frailty of this medium, and the obvious issues of public and private good… The University of Michigan, in its collaboration with Google, has just celebrated digitally archiving its one millionth book. (Read more about the ‘Googlization of Everything’ here.)
