jill/txt

Business cards are sort of old hat, really, aren’t they? But when I received a copy of Uses of Blogs last week, I found Axel’s business card stuck instead it and I rather liked that. So I thought it might be time to order new ones, so I can stick them inside of any books I were to send anyone, or other things, you know. I’ll have to think up things to send people now, won’t I? Our business cards look a lot nicer than last time I ordered them. They’re also cheaper and you can get them online. I love how they’re double-sided and bilingual. Kind of like me.

Hilde and I just hired an assistant to help with the practical organisation of the World of Warcraft research workshop we’re hosting in November. Hooray! Now we have to set the program and then next week, travel and so on can be organised. Hm, maybe we should make guild tabards out of brown paper bags or something ;)

The workshop won’t be open, I’m afraid, apart from maybe one brief session. We’re working on an anthology of cultural approaches to World of Warcraft and so we’ll literally be workshopping draft chapters. It should be a lot of fun and very useful.

I came across Koenraad in the copy room yesterday photocopying a dozen or so copies of Christine Wennerås and Agnes Wold’s dissection of the review process for Swedish post. docs (here’s a freely available copy for those without insitutional access), where they very convincingly demonstrate that to get the same score in the evaluations, female candidates had to have 2.5 times as many publications as men. I’d heard about the study while listening to Virginia Vallan’s talk Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (highly recommended!) but hadn’t actually read it before. After reading, I’m shocked that the results aren’t more widely known and discussed. This paper is almost ten years old!

So in brief: Wennerås and Wold noticed that while there is an almost equal number of male and female applicants for post docs in medical sciences in Sweden, twice as many men as women actually receive a fellowship. They wanted to know whether this was due to the female applicants simply not being as good, or due to a gender bias. Conveniently, there was central and consistant evaluation of these candidates, but the evaluations were not public. So Wennerås and Wold went to court to gain access - and they gained it, as the Swedish consitution makes state documents that are not a threat to national security open to the public. Once they had the data, they analysed it in a number of ways. First they found that only the very best women were given a score as high as the average man, and that women with equal numbers of publications as men got lower scores than those men. Women would in fact have to publish 2.5 times as much to get the same score as men. Oh, having an affiliation with a committee member helped a lot, too, even though the person you were affiliated with was not allowed to be directly involved in assessing you. There’s lots more: you should read the paper, it’s only three pages long.
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People often ask how much time I spend on blogging. I’ve been using SlimTimer for the last couple of weeks, so for the first time I actually know. This week I’ve spent 3.9 hours reading blogs and 0.9 hours writing and editing my blog. Last week I spent 2.9 hours reading blogs and 1.8 hours tending to my own. That’s really not very much - I think it would probably do me good to spend more time on this.

Blogs are similar to epistolary narratives in that they are episodic and serial, told in a series of almost-real-time fragments (or in the case of fiction, fragments presented as though they were written in real time) rather than as a whole told after something worth of narration has occurred. Going through notes in DEVONthink I found a quote about epistolary narratives which is rather fitting for blogs:

Cette position temporelle, qui rend le narrateur contemporain de ce qu’il raconte, tend à faire de la narration l’action elle-même. . . . L’instrument épistolaire permet de concevoir un narrateur qui ne reconterait rien, qui n’aurait d’autre objet que sa propre rédaction et l’effet de celle-ci sur lui même ou sur autrui. [this temporal position, which makes the narrator contemporary with what he is telling, tends to make the narration itself into the action . . . The epistolary instrument makes it possible to imagine a narrator who would tell nothing, who would have no other object than his own writing and its effect on himself or others.] (Jean Rousset, Narcisse romancier, 60. Qtd. in MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP. 1990. 13)

This makes me think not only of the idea that a research blog doesn’t document research but rather performs or is research, but that perhaps this imaginary narrator who would tell nothing is actually present in many blogs?

Reading Gro’s comment yesterday about simply dedicating three-four hours a day to one’s main project, I decided to work at home today and focus on writing. But, um, of course I needed to start with a little blog reading to get me in the mood and along the way I found all these academic lifehack tools. I’m rather interested in DEVONthink, which I think I must have heard of before but not really looked at. Steven Johnson’s article for the NY Times about using it while writing sounds so seductive:

What does this mean in practice? Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain’s remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I’d then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head — I’d forgotten about the chimpanzee connection — and I’d select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me. (Steven Johnson, NY Times

Apparently the idea is you feed all your documents and pdfs and possibly relevant emails (folders of archives of mailing lists, perhaps?) and whatnot into it and of course you can then search them all through it but the most interesting thing is it’ll find connections itself.

Sounds cool, eh? I’ve installed the free trial, have imported my “Documents/work/research” folder and am going to give it a go. To help me get started, I’m using Steven Johnson’s explanation of how he uses DEVONthink in practice. If you have experience with DEVONthink (or something similar) I’d love to hear about it!

Home again from Umeå, and what interesting conversations we had, perhaps especially the informal ones, in between and round about. Today I have to try to rein in some projects and figure out what to do with some potential new ones. I find that so hard: I get all enthusiastic about new ideas or projects people approach me with but then in the cold light of day my enthusiasm may well still be there but it’s kept company by a realism reminding me of how many other commitments I already have.

You should never, ever say yes or no immediately, regardless of how you feel about a proposal or request, a friend once told me her father said. He was a professor and had had decades of experience with the university system. If you’re super-enthusiastic and feel sure this is a brilliant idea you should still say something like “That sounds really interesting, give me a few days to think it over.” If you hate the sound of something you should still do the delay-the-decision thing: “Hm, I doubt I’ll be able to do that, but give me a few days to think it over.”

Bizarrely enough I know this, I can sometimes do this, but then I’ll just completely forget. Either because I’m so flattered that someone thought of me to do something or just as often because I’m quite simply really interested in an idea. So I end up with even more things to do, just as I’m striving to limit the load to something manageable.

Hm. Is it really unstrategic to blog that? Oh well - I know I’m not alone in this, and maybe sharing it will help me do something about it. Or maybe you have other solutions to this problem?

Huh. Hand hurts. So much for live blogging. Will take a break.

T.L. Taylor’s talking about “Reconsidering Emergence” here at the dirn workshop at HUMlab, and it’s being streamed, so if you want to follow my live blogging and watch the video stream, you can. This post’ll be updated as I go.

Oh, and bloggers: this talk is really interesting for its parallels to blogs and the “game” of blogging, with ranking and referrals and trackbacks and comments and “mods” to the software, which TL doesn’t specifically mention, because she’s looking at MMOGs, not blogs, but which I kept thinking about and which Lilia asked about too, so it wasn’t just me.

The kind of character you choose in an online environment affects the data you can collect. In a game like WoW or Everquest, the class you choose affects your experience of the game. These early methodological choices we make shape how we can understand any multiuser space. We need to watch for how these choices affect the stories we tell about the space later on.
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I’m going back to Umeå in a couple of days, and this time I’m hoping for that Northern summer feeling. Oh, I suppose we have that here in Bergen too, but I’m used to Bergen, you know, and Umeå’s even further north. Also, there are going to be lots of interesting people at the workshop, so it should be lots of fun!

I can hardly believe that it’s four years since I was there. They streamed it live, back then, and Liz, who’d only been blogging for a couple of months, was “there”, asking questions and blogging a screenshot. Mind you, both her and my images are broken in those posts. That’s how websites age, not with wrinkles, but broken images…

I wrote yesterday about how blogs are becoming mainstream, and in a comment to that post, Trond reminded me that the president of Iran now blogs at ahmadinejad.ir. Despite initial discussions of the blogs veracity (Boing Boing: “Either the presidential blog is fake, or they are total n00bs.“) it is now clear that the blog is official, though unlikely to be written by the president personally - politicians usually get their assistents to do their blogging.

Of course, it’s particularly interesting that the president of Iran has started a blog, given that Iranian blogs are among the most common examples given of how blogging can give a voice and a space for a counterculture and a political opposition in a non-democratic society.

Orientations are in an hour and fifteen minutes, and I still have to finalise my syllabus (semesterplan). Oh, it’s fine, it has been for weeks, but I’d like it to be prettier, and more informative, and better, and nicely laid out and all that. Given I only have an hour left it likely won’t be.

However, orientations should be more fun than usual. Rather than do a boring row of presentations of all our courses, we’re just briefly introducing everyone who teaches at the department, emphasising our research interests as well as what we’re teaching (particularly important for students who’ll be finding advisors for their own research), we’ll put out the syllabi on a table and serve food and drinks - hopefully the food and drinks and informality will help students get to know each other and make it easy for them to ask teachers questions about the courses they’d like to take.

OK. Time to finish that syllabus and help Unn-Therese set up the tables and food and such.

Way back when, Henry Jenkins didn’t have a weblog, which Torill and I used as an example of the way the web can invert some power relationships - with no weblog, the influential MIT professor of media and popular culture had no online voice with which to meet criticism from bloggers.

Years have passed, and Henry Jenkins now has a blog, a very interesting one, too. This morning he posted an email from a former student of his who sent him a long description, with illustrations, of blogs in her native Lebanon, and of “city blogging”, graffiti in Amsterdam and New York that expresses opinions and care about the bombings.

The post is interesting in itself, but also illustrates a larger change in how blogs are being used. Four years ago, Jenkins wrote of bloggers as an exotic species very different from himself:

Like cockroaches after nuclear war, online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot coms. (…) Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering,
sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We
surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the
digital revolution. (Note: The bit about “cockroaches” generated a lot of upset among bloggers, and was actually removed from the article after publication. Apparently it was the editor who put it in, not Jenkins himself.)

Today blogs are mainstream. According to a phone survey Pew Internet conducted last month in the US, 39% of internet users read blogs and 9% write blogs. Another recent survey shows that only 40% of the US population had read a newspaper “yesterday” and only 36% had listened to the radio. (Norwegians read more newspapers: in Norway, in 2005, 74% of the population read a newspaper on an average day.) Now I realise that these statistics don’t quite match - that’s 39% of internet users, not of the whole population, and they didn’t say they read a blog “yesterday”, they said they read blogs in general, so the figures aren’t really comparable - and yet they do show that blogs are rapidly closing in on radio and newspapers as mainstream, everyday experiences.

As more and more people read and write blogs, they’re obviously going to become less like an extreme sport. Today, professors blog. Politicians blog. Celebrities blog. Sure, there are still more regular people who blog than people-in-conventional-positions-of-power who blog, but the balance is shifting.

Henry Jenkins blogging is, of course, wonderful. It not only means he can speak in the same arena as other bloggers, responding directly, for instance, to criticism of his new book, it also means we get to share some of the feeling of the classroom and the richness of his day to day connections. MIT’s Open Courseware is a wonderful sharing of teaching paraphernalia, but real learning and research, in my experience, happens less in reading syllabi and watchign lectures and more in the intersections between experiences and ideas that you find in conversations and social groups. Watching Jenkins discuss his book and share thoughts his students and ex-students have shared with him is far more interesting than leafing through the assignments given in an MIT classroom.

Oy. Start of semester. Suddenly, summer is over (though not the weather, luckily) and there are a zillion things to do. My to do list is a folded sheet of paper four days deep. Switch gears!

I’m currently writing about the prehistory of blogs, and Nicholas Lemann’s article in the New Yorker last week (see also Steven Johnson’s reminder about the non has a summary of how pamphleteers a couple of centuries ago in many ways mirror blogs in their effect on mainstream media. Lemann refers extensively to a book on pamphleteers and politics in Stuart Britain by Mark Knights, and writes:

These voices entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.

As media, Knights points out, both pamphlets and periodicals were radically transformative in their capabilities. Pamphlets were a mass medium with a short lead time—cheap, transportable, and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. They were, as Knights puts it, “capable of assuming different forms (letters, dialogues, essays, refutations, vindications, and so on)” and, he adds, were “ideally suited to making a public statement at a particular moment.” Periodicals were, by the standards of the day, “a sort of interactive entertainment,” because of the invention of letters to the editor and because publications were constantly responding to their readers and to one another.

Then as now, the new media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. Knights writes, “Polemical print . . . challenged conventional notions of how rhetoric worked and was a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity.” But one of Knights’s most useful observations is that this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Each side in what Knights understands, properly, as the media front in a merciless political struggle between Whigs and Tories soon began accusing the other of trafficking in lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and special pleading, and presenting itself as the avatar of the public interest, civil discourse, and epistemologically derived truth. Knights sees this genteeler style of expression as just another political tactic, but it nonetheless drove print publication toward a more reasoned, less inflamed rhetorical stance, which went along with a partial settling down of British politics from hot war between the parties to cold. (Full-dress British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian, did not emerge until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well into this calmer period and long after Knights ends his story.) At least in part, Internet journalism will surely repeat the cycle, and will begin to differentiate itself tonally, by trying to sound responsible and trustworthy in the hope of building a larger, possibly paying audience.

Other items in the prehistory of blogs include Alexandre Dumas’ personal newspaper, Thomas Edison’s diaries and art criticism in pamphlets and zines.