jill/txt

Andreas Kitzmann’s book Saved from Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams looks as though it might be useful for studying weblogs and such. The book “focuses on the major forms of self-documentation that have been in use since the late nineteenth century and covers traditional diaries, snapshot photography, home movies/videos, and web-based media such as web cams and online diaries or journals.” I’ve put it in my Amazon.com shopping basket.

Phil Agre’s Networking on the Network, which I’ve mentioned before, is an amazingly thorough article on how to succeed in academia, from the grad student phase through the first ten years, at least, of having a “real job”. One of the reasons I appreciate my PhD advisor so much is that he actually taught me a lot of this without my even realising I was learning it. But the more I learn about navigating academia the more new territories appear.

Right now I’m finishing the last revision of my paper on distributed narrative for the AoIR Annual. Turns out I’ve done exactly what Agre would suggest - identify an emerging theme, give it a name, and start by writing a paper:

One way to get started on this is to write a (short or long) survey paper that describes the pattern you see emerging, puts a name on it, sketches in a sympathetic way how various projects (your own and others’) seem to fit within it, explains what can be learned by looking at things this way, extracts a set of axioms or principles or methods or organizing concepts, and outlines some suggested lines of future research. Another approach is simply to write a paper that explains your own research in terms of the emerging pattern and then, as a secondary matter, explains how the other projects fit in. And a third approach is to attempt to organize a workshop or other small-scale professional meeting around the theme you’ve begun to articulate.

Looking at this, I need to work on “extracting a set of axioms or principles or methods or organizing concepts”, don’t I. The rest of my paper pretty much does what Agre suggests.

Following this are detailed instructions on how to arrange a workshop on the topic - by a fairly long-winded but very sympathetic process of asking people their advice and not presenting a fait accompli. After this should try to edit a book on the “emerging theme”, preferably inviting a senior colleague to do the diplomacy while you, as the junior, do all the work. And so on and so forth.

It sounds kind of cynical, but if you read it, it’s actually very much weighted towards community-building, inclusiveness and the social networking that’s a necessary part of ideas and, sure, careers. I rather like it. And it will take me twenty or thirty years to do everything it suggests. That’s probably OK - I still have 33 years and a few months left to do this, after all, if retirement age remains 67.

OMG.

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS! Good grief, there’s certainly no rush!

A nice discussion, here, of that infuriating argument that there aren’t many women politicians/professors/video gamers because women don’t want to be politicians/professors/video gamers.

It’s nice to try and assume that we needn’t change anything. Women who want a part of it, get it; the vast majority simply don’t want it.

The post includes a quote from a paper that analyses gender differences in communication in an online university-level course. The findings are detailed, the explanations are thorough and there are dozens of references. The paragraph that follows mirrors my own experiences as a graduate student, as a teacher trying to include the women in discussions and even as a woman out on the town with male and female friends and colleagues. Listen:

[M]ale students tended to dominate the online discussion for a time period (many times over days). When a female interjected a message, the resulting trend was an abundance of more female messages. Time after time this female pattern of communication was stopped by a male message of an extraordinary length (usually pages and pages), a message containing a female “put-down”, or a message of an arrogant nature. After this occurred it was often days before female students would post any messages.

There are far more detailed descriptions of how men and women wrote differently. For instance, men’s posts lacked social softeners and relationship-builders like please, thank you, do you think so, I hope this helps you. They rarely asked questions and often gave answers. They rarely referred to themself or gave personal information. They tended to present their statements as absolute, unquestionable, correct, and they often used put downs to other people in the group.

Although I didn’t find this in the paper quoted above, Sherry Garner Ray also claims that when women acted like the men were acting, they didn’t succeed. Quite the opposite: they became social pariah, outcast both by the men and by the women.

Encouraging, isn’t it? The thing that might be the hardest to deal with is that men seem to have no idea they’re even doing this.

[Update 30/3: the end of the exposed plagiarist story]
There have been a few cases of plagiarism of the cut-and-paste from the web variety by students at our department, and luckily the university has very clear routines for how to handle it. If an exam paper or paper submitted for assessment in a portfolio is suspected to contain plagiarism, the person grading the paper may not grade it but instead sends it on to a committee with an explanation of what the problem is and the committee decides what is to be done. The student also has the opportunity to explain him- or herself. I believe the committee has a lawyer and a couple of student representatives on it, which seems fair. If the student is found to have plagiarised, the exam will be annulled and the student may be barred from taking exams at any university in Norway for one or two semesters, depending on the gravity of the plagiarism and how advanced the student is. Obviously it is seen as more serious if a grad student plagiarises than if a first semester does so and there’s reasonable grounds to think it might be a misunderstanding.

As a grad student I taught a little in other departments and once graded an exam paper where 2/3 of the paper was cut and paste from the net with no sources given. I reported it to the person who was responsible for the course, but was told to simply fail the student. The next semester I heard from other teachers that the same student had done exactly the same thing in another class, and thinking it was the first time it had happened, they hadn’t reported it either. Imagine what we teach students if we allow them to plagiarise their work?

All the cases I’ve come up against in Norway so far involve students who wrote in English, which was a second language for them, or foreign students who struggled to write in Norwegian. That may have made the cut and paste sections particularly visible to their teachers. Perhaps there is just as much plagiarism in essays written in the student’s first language, but the paragraphs are translated or better integrated so that teachers don’t notice.

I was amused by this exposé of an American college student who foolishly asked a comedy writer to write an essay for her. He accepted, found out her real name, wrote a cut-and-paste essay he assumed would be detected as plagiarism, wrote it up on the web, and sent an email to her Dean.

Of course, it’s not really amusing. It’s tragic for students who are banned from taking exams for a year of their lives. It casts the whole system of portfolio evaluations and grading into doubt, because there must be so many cases that aren’t caught. And yes, even scholars plagiarise - the Vice-Chancellor (equivalent to the rektor in Norway or the President in the US) of Monash University in Melbourne resigned after having been found to be a “serial plagiariser” in the seventies and eighties (he’s now getting a top job in academia again). It is entiredly possible to imagine an academic community based on sharing ideas freely, but as long as each individual academic and his or her institution gain or lose financial benefits and scholarly respect directly based on publication and citations of said publications, plagiarism will be the academic equivalent of embezzlement. Students’ plagiarising is a slightly different issue. Yes, it threatens our perception of the academic system of publishing being fair and natural. It also threatens our system of giving grades and degrees. Finally plagiarism threatens the whole idea that university and college students are supposed to be learning something more substantial than how to game the system and get a degree.

Most of all I’ve discovered my own fury when confronted with plagiarism, though. They think I’m stupid not to see through this? How dare they waste my time like this? Why on earth would I put effort into doing a good job as their teacher when this is all they think learning is worth?

I think we need to be strict and very consistent about plagiarism.

While I’ve been reading blogs written by anonymous thirty-something year old female academics griping about the sides of the profession nobody warned us about, people of, presumably, every other profession on earth have been blogging their own professional tales of woe. I can’t remember how I came across anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com - but after a diligent five minutes reading I have no idea whether it’s a parody or not. It certainly panders to the stereotypes. Probably our academic blogs do too.

Bloggers are tracking today’s earthquake in Asia. Tomorrow there’s a memorial service for Shyrin. My daughter sang me the songs they’ll be singing. It’s good to have a concrete task, something important and defined to give to people, a ritual way of expressing your feelings. Maybe blogging is much like singing.

I’ve tried to calculate which mobile phone service would really be cheapest for me, based on my usage patterns, but I gave up in utter disgust at the complexity of it all. Next time I try and figure this out (which should be soon) I’m going to use telepriser.no, an updated customisable calculator provided by Post og teletilsynet, the Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority. Privatising telecommunciations sure didn’t lead to a system that could be easily maneouvered by consumers. In a slightly disconcerted way, I’m glad a little of my tax money has been spent on a calculator to explain the wiley ways of a market economy in practice.

Imperfektum.net is the new portal to Norwegian weblogs. As the title suggests, this portal will include blogs that are not perfect renditions of perfect lives, and it isn’t limited to diaries either, as is the previously only such portal, nettdagbok.no.

Imperfektum.net is a direct result of the fuss over the exclusion of Hvis jeg var Beathe from Nettdagbok.no. Torill explains it all - basically, Hvis jeg var Beathe is a blog/diary written by a boy who wants to write as though he’s a girl. The title means “if I were Beathe”, Beathe being a girl’s name. Nettdagbok.no refused to include the blog in their list of recently updated sites because they said it wasn’t true.

It’s great to see diversity in the Norwegian blogosphere. Almost makes me wish I wrote in Norwegian, since I’m assume a more-or-less Norwegian blog written in English won’t work.

Heh. Jilltxt is having a massage. (Uh, OK, so it’s only funny if you use Flickr…)

Don’t you hate it when you can’t track down a citation? Amazon’s full text search of books shows that William Gibson’s Neuromancer certainly doesn’t contain the words “the street finds its own use for things” or any sentence, in fact, with the words street, use or uses and things in it. The line is all over the web, though, always attributed to Gibson, and usually to Neuromancer. Where it is not. And me, well, I like the line, which makes me think of Neuromancer, and I want to use it!

Hanna told me about Banksy a few weeks ago, when I was all fascinated by the stencil artists in Bergen. Last Saturday I narrowly missed seeing his work in the New York Metropolitan Museum. Unfortunately we were happy with looking at the modern art there. If we’d only stepped over to look at older masterpieces, we might have seen an absolutely new one, hung that very day, I assume, by Banksy himself. This particular work was removed Sunday morning, but others may remain. A full photodocumentary, including photos of the works, may be perused at your leisure. (via Kottke)

I want to write a paragraph about electronic literature in the early days of the web. Michael Shumate’s Hyperizons is a good place to start, given it hasn’t been updated since July 97, but even so it lists over 60 hypertext fictions. What was there before 1995? Do you remember?

I suspect I can write the paper perfectly well without these details but of course now I want to know.

And damn it, I was there, surfing the web in 1993 and 1994, wandering through the Virtual Library’s literature/hypertext section. I should remember. But I don’t, and the Electronic Literature Directory won’t let me search by year.
Further finds:

• Michael Shumate’s short article about new developments in web hyperfiction in 1996
• Prentiss Riddle’s Search for Some Hypertext Fiction, 1995
• Carolyn Guyer’s list of hypertext fiction, with an accompanying article in Feed Magazine. 1995.

I’m reading Bolter and Joyce’s 1987 paper describing Storyspace and arguing for the possibility of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, situating this in relation to interactive fiction and to dadaism, Borges and other twentieth century experimental literature. (more…)

People don’t whisper in the library here. I wonder if that’s a Stockton thing or an American thing?

I looked (not sternly even) at the guy yakking on to the woman at the desk behind me and he instantly went “sorry, am I disturbing you?” so there’s an awareness at some level, but then his attempts at whispering were comically loud.

My typing might be really annoying, come to think of it.