Earlier this week, Kathleen Fitzpatrick presented a statement to the National Academy of Sciences on the MLA’s position on public access to scholarly work. I was particularly interested in this line: we may in coming years operate under a model…
MLA and open scholarly communication
movement to wordpress
After ten years, I’ve moved from typepad to wordpress. I won’t bore you with the story, but I’m still working on migrating my disqus-based comments. Hopefully that will all be worked out this weekend.
humanities (in)decision-making
In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman continues the discussion about the relative wisdom of entering graduate school in the humanities. In my mind, it comes down to this: getting a phd in the humanities (9.3 years on average) takes so…
do android graders dream of electric comma splices?
On e-Literate, Elijah Mayfield has a good post addressing some of the myths (his term) going on around the subject of machine grading, particularly in response to the NY Times article that provocatively suggested that "Essay Grading Software Offers Professors…
fields, streams, and other media ecologies
Collin Brooke has a recent post revisiting an old CCCC presentation (I was there and posted about it back then. Collin updates his thinking in response to Anil Dash's talk on "The Web We Lost" and here. Jeff Rice also writes…
community, experiment, and the future of composition
The SUNY Council of Writing's annual conference was held yesterday in Buffalo. There were a number of interesting panels. Richard Miller and Kelly Kinney gave excellent plenary talks. Here I want to think about some of these conversations in relation…
Latour and correlationism
Earlier this month, Levi had a post discussing his reservations regarding the term correlationism. His concern, as I understand it, is that we have reached a point where, at least in some circles, the declaration that somthing is "correlationist" has…
Vitanza’s big rhetoric and “some more”
Iternation has an interview with Victor Vitanza where he discusses the idea of "big rhetoric" (see below). Big rhetoric is a concept that has been around for a few decades. It remarks on the move by which all forms of…
machines are readers too
As Steve Krause has noted and has been discussed a fair amount recently on the WPA-list, there is reason to be concerned with the growing role of grading writing by machines. There is a new site and petition (humanreaders.org), and…
object-oriented marketing… sort of
Atlantic Monthly has an article this month, "Anthropology Inc," that examines the ethnographic work of corporate anthropologists (a contentious term in itself, at least for academic anthropologists). The article focuses on a single company and one of its co-founders Christian Madsbjerg. …