jill/txt

I just spent four solid hours head-of-departmenting, and my to-do list for tomorrow is still long as my arm. For tonight, too, actually. I haven’t even started on the teaching to-do list.

What heads of departments do? Well, today I’ve tried to understand the budget, I’ve had lots of people in my office, I’ve answered emails about issues ranging from booking a room at a time that suits other classes, accreditation for courses taken in Romania, contracts for MA students and a need for more shelves in the student labs, all the way through budgets and who’ll teach what next semester and preparing comments to a memo on how the administration might reorganise and ending up with basic discussions about the future of the discipline. The latter - the future, that is - has become rather an urgent question because the humanities faculty is reorganising in the next few months. Oh, I did twenty-five minutes of work for ELiNOR, as well (bills, getting the blog set up, email). Organising and preparing teaching comes in addition, of course, as does supervising MA students. And I’m supposed to be spending 50% of my time on research!

I’m paid to work a standard 37,5 hour week, that means 18 3/4 hours a week on research and 18 3/4 hours a week on teaching and administration. Of course there’s less teaching in summer, though advising and planning always needs to be done.

I’ve already started recording how much time I’m spending on what. I’m going to need to know when I ask the dean how to prioritise my time.

(Btw, I know lists of look-how-much-I-did-today are frightfully boring. Someone asked me, though, whether I would be blogging being head of deparment as I blogged getting my PhD, and so I thought I’d see what it would be like if I did. I’m not sure whether I’ll continue. There are a lot of things that can’t quite be blogged because noone quite knows yet and, well, you know. Stuff.)

Deborah Wheeler is a visiting researcher at our university this semester, and tomorrow she’s giving the first of a series of lectures that looks really interesting, on “Identity and Ethics in Global Internet Diffusion”. The series is run as a grad seminar but is also open to anyone who’s interested, and Dr Wheeler has particular expertise in Middle-Eastern studies and gender studies, I believe.

This looks like utter fun: a 15 hour circuitbending workshop where the goal is to, well, break electronic toys in ways that produce fabulous sounds. I wish I could go, but fifteen hours, a week of afternoons, is far too much. Which is tragic and I now know exactly what Espen and others meant when they told me I would miss my PhD student days.

Of course I like having more money and respect and power and all that. (The power comes with severe limitations, unfortunately.) But I’d love to spend a week circuitbending.

Maybe you can, though? I mean, it’s free!

I love it when I forget that I submitted something and then I get a letter of acceptance!

My paper on distributed narrative, the revised, 10 page version of what I presented at AoIR in September, has been accepted for publication in the Association of Internet Researchers Annual! That’s a real book with just a selection of the papers that were presented at the conference. The second annual’s not out yet, but this is what the first annual looks like. My paper will be in the third annual.

I have to make some small changes. Make the intro less abrupt, make some colloquialisms easier for non-natives to understand, I forgot to put Gibson in the bibliography, that sort of thing, nothing big. I’m so glad I forced myself to rewrite the paper and send it in, even though I assumed it wouldn’t be accepted.

Ooh, this makes me all eager to do more work on distributed narratives! There’s been no research in my life this month. All my time has been spent on teaching, coordinating, organising and you know, stuff that has to be done and is quite interesting in its own ways, but leaves no space over for reading, thinking and writing.

Jamie Blustein alerted me to the cover story of the latest issue of Interactions, ACM’s magazine, which is by Jim Miller and about immersive gaming and storytelling. Here’s the abstract: if you’re lucky your library or university might have a subscription and you’ll be able to click right through to the PDF. The article is about Exocog, which was “.a set of Web sites that provided a five-week experiment in this new realm.” I see Jim Miller’s also listed as the contact person at Exocog.com for people who might want to know more about immersive marketing. Must explore this.

Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. –Walker Evans

Torill alerts me to our nomination for best tech blog in the European Weblog Awards! Or the Satin Pyjama awards. European Weblog Awards would look better on the CV, but, ya know, just being nominated is flattering in itself. Actually, nominations can go on CVs, too, can’t they?

I’m not sure why we’re tech weblogs. Is it my complaints about installing Wordpress, do you think? Then of course, there’s the question of awards in general. I whizzed through the list, found I really only knew one or two of the weblogs in each category and so proceeded to vote for them, I’m not really convinced that such awards are really going to be particularly, well, see, surely the point of weblogs is that we don’t have to agree about which ones are best?

Still, you’ve gotta admit, it’s kind of cool

You know that thing that now you shouldn’t use www. at the start of a domain name anymore? It’s a W3C standard, I’m sure, but I can’t find it on their site. Can you help me?

Wow. I’m probably going to end up head of our (quite small) department from next week or so. There’ll be an election, but no other candidates. There simply isn’t anyone else who can do it right now. It’s going to be a challenging job I suspect, because the arts and humanities faculty is currently reorganising everything, so we’ll be going through some big changes in the next couple of years.

A few months ago I was seriously thinking that I’d quit my job sooner than be head of the department. From everything I’ve heard, the increased administration basically means I can forget research for the next couple of years. There’s no extra pay or extra research leave afterwards, either, as there is for some administration jobs. That doesn’t seem like a great way to start a research career.

But then you know, thinking about it, tenure’s a pretty groovy thing to have, and so far I haven’t come across a job I’d rather have, not one that’s in Bergen where I need to be, anyway. And I’m renovating my flat, and I like my salary, and… OK, I admit it: I’ve sold my soul. Lisbeth is head of her department, and enjoys it, though she admits it’s a lot of work. She pointed out that being head of department is good experience for future work leading research projects. I know I would hate to sit on the sideline during this process of change. And it’s a little department, which doesn’t, apparently, necessarily mean correspondingly less work.

I’m worried, though, that if I don’t get any research done for two years it will be very hard to get back. And no, I wouldn’t worry about that if I was considering maternity leave or a two year leave to explore India and learn paragliding. The thing is, I don’t know whether I’ll be happy doing a job that’s all administration and teaching. I signed up for the academia thing because I enjoy research. I enjoy teaching largely because it’s connected to my research and I love sharing that knowledge.

Of course, maybe I’ll love it. I’m good at organising things. And I love knowing how things really work and having a say in things. Perhaps I’ll get a taste for administration, decide research is boring and step from this to a high-flying corporate gig that pays four times what I get now, kissing academia goodbye forever. Or I’ll aim to be dean, no, president of the university, no, why stop there, I’ll be minister for education! Or perhaps I’ll enjoy it and be perfectly happy to return to research when I’m done.

Ooh, look: travelling scholarships to the Faroe Islands! I’d love to go there some day. No, I don’t think I’ll come up with a project suitable to apply for these travelling scholarships, but maybe you’d like to go spend a few weeks studying blogging in the Faroes or something? The grants are for students or young scholars, and the deadline is March 15.

I enjoy seminars. I like being able to talk with the students rather than to them, I like learning to know them as individuals and I like seeing them hunkering down together and getting stuff done. I really enjoy the discussions we get going as well.

Here’s “Seminar 1″ in HUIN105, the course on web design and interpretation I’m teaching this spring. There are lots of students, because the course is open, which means we have a very lively group and unfortunately not quite as much space as would be ideal. This is half of the class: other half of the class will be in seminar 2 tomorrow, doing the same stuff as these students did today, and they’re also split into four tutorials. Oh, and then there are plenary lectures for everyone, once a week. The first one had a few technical problems, but good points as well ;)

Lisbeth Klastrup’s tracking the use of blogs in the upcoming Danish elections. Her first post on the topic lists blogs that are tracking the media, blogs by groups of politicians and by individual politicians.

I’m registering my publications and talks and everything in FRIDA, the just-become national Norwegian research database which will not only serve as a bibliography of Norwegian research, it’s also going to be where the powers that be figure out how much money to give us. Each department will be getting a portion of their funding according to the number and nature of their publications.

So of course I want to register my weblog. Given I can and will register an interview the student radio did with me, or that lecture I gave in Oslo where five people turned up, I figure my blog must be worth registering. But I can’t find any category that’s suitable.

Anders, Carsten, Hilde, Torill and any other academic Norwegian bloggers: how are you entering your weblogs?

First lecture this semester, and I had it all worked out. I started taking notes for the lecture a week and a half ago; the blog post with the links I’d need was drafted on Friday, ready for a quick click of the publish button. I checked the network connection in the auditorium on Friday, I sat up till midnight Sunday finding those last links, the ones I never used anyway, and I photocopied the corrected overview of the semester this morning. I’d used the projector before, so didn’t bother to check that it worked. Ha.

What could go wrong? Well, you know I wouldn’t be writing this if nothing went wrong.

1. I forgot the connecter, that nasty thing Apple has decided every laptop they sell needs to connect to a projector. Of course ibooks, 12 inch powerbooks and 15 inch powerbooks all use different connectors, but fortunately, our Mac guy was in and had just the right sort! Saved.
2. The room was already taken. See, when I thought I had the room every Monday all semester, what that really meant was every Monday from January 26th. This Monday the room was booked for a group of four students doing an exam. OK: the room downstairs was empty, so we moved there. Except there was no network connection there, so we move up again. Luckily for me, my horde of fifty students outside the door scared the other teacher away and they found another room. Saved.
3. Expertly connecting all the cords and computers and projectors while smiling to the students I suddenly realised that the connector would connect to my powerbook but not to the cable. After emptying the projector bag on the desk and finding every sort of cable but the kind I needed, I gritted my teeth, leered at the students and yelped that we would be discussing the web without technology for the next hour. How about we start by hearing all about your backgrounds? Saved.
4. In the break I dashed over to the IT people, projector and laptop in my hands for safekeeping, and borrowed a Windows laptop from them. They set it up superfast, lent me extensions, the correct cable, which still didn’t fit the powerbook connector Diego had lent me, a power adaptor, a long ethernet cable. Laden down with gear, I staggered back to the lecture theatre. Only to find that I apparently hadn’t brought the power adaptor and the laptop was out of juice. And that only one student knew where the IT department was, and she was very heavily pregnant so couldn’t really do stairs and therefore wasn’t really a good person to send to fetch the adaptor.

But then, oh joy! Just as I was opening my mouth to say that I would be drawing webpages on the board and asking them to imagine them moving, one of the front row students coughed. “Would this help?”, he asked, holding out an ibook complete with the correct connector.

I’m going to enjoy this semester. Students with ibooks and connectors in the front row, four students with blogs in the back row, students who know nothing about this stuff but think it sounds really interesting, and ten students who not only have websites, they have their own domain dotted round the room.

And next lecture, I’ll bring all the cables. I promise.

(May your day be more successful.)

Did you look at Justin Hall’s blog lately? Justin’s been publishing his life online for eleven years, with an honesty (well, an apparent honesty, I don’t know him apart from his website so can’t verify anything, but it’s certainly truthful in the way that literature is truthful) and sustainability that’s awesome.

Right now his usual site has been replaced by a ten minute video, where he cries into the camera asking how to combine his deep need to make media, write, publish, share with his need to have meaningful relationships and love. If the front page of his site is different when you go to look, here’s a direct link to the video.

Blogging, writing his life online, feeds some of the same needs as religion, Justin says:

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do that’s like religion that you practice with yourself, that’s a dialogue with the divine turns out to drive people away from you?

“There’s always someone there.” But it’s not working. “Because I can’t write about people because they don’t want to be there and I have nothing to write about (..) and I publish my life on the fucking internet and it doesn’t make people want to be with me, it makes people not trust me and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.”

It is a form of art, this media-making so many of us have come to feel is part of life. I don’t want Justin the real person to be in pain, of course not, but a stop and a video like this is a strong narrative move and a cautionary note as well.

I’ve started reading Viviane Serfaty’s The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, which is a literary rather than an ethnographical or quantitative approach to diaries online. She notes the twofold nature of the screen, which is both a veil and a mirror:

The literal function of a screen is precisely to conceal and as a result of this perception, all kinds of highly controversial discourses are freely displayed on the Net. The screen seemingly offers a protection against the gaze of others, enabling each diary writer to disclose intimate thoughts and deeds, thus attempting to achieve transparency and braking the taboo of opacity regulating social relationships. (13)

Serfaty quotes Jean Starobinski, whom in 1971, writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote what could as well be a description of bloggers and readers: “Making oneself invisible means one no longer is a mere transparency anyone can see thought, but that one has turned into a gaze no taboo can stop.” (Starobinski 1971: 302)

Look at Justin’s gaze, fixing the camera, fixing you, fixing himself. In the final moments, after the sobbing yet self-aware phonecall with a friend, right at the end of the video he’s wiped away the tears and whispers into the camera:

I’m alone because of what I did. And I’m going to be alone because of what I’m doing. Can you take that? How does that sound? [small smile] How does that sound? Hi? Hi, hi, hi…be alone. [smile] Do you like this? This is company. This is relating. This is relating. You’re crazy.

You’re crazy. Is he talking to himself, or to you? To the mirror, or through the veil?

“Without the prohibition of intimate disclosure, there would be no transgression. The prohibition therefore is constitutive of the meaning of self-revelation on the Internet.” (Serfaty 2004: 13-14)