My intuition is that, even for the wary, recalcitrant, or skeptical, the ways individuals connect now online and learn from one another’s connections no longer represent the pathological or aberrant (i.e. the shallow, distracted, lonely, asocial, unprofessional digital generation: you know the litany!), but “the future.” Since many are worried about “the future,” those who seem to have a firmer grasp on it are now seen not as needing rehab but as harbingers. That’s a good thing.

So, here are some ad hoc hints about how to make your online publications relevant and professional.

Genre Fiction is Disruptive Technology: A response to the New Yorker on guilty pleasures http://t.co/yntmoa32

So here's the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can't get health insurance (if you're American). You don't have to be a complete loner, but it helps to have a solitary streak (or a bad talking-to-cats habit). It also helps to be an inveterate optimist, because you'll probably need to supplement your income (about 70% of the mean for someone in a skilled trade, never mind a professional job) by taking on other work such as teaching, journalism, or consultancy. As a business, it's a dead-end: you can't generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee's hands. And then, finally, when you go out in public and people ask you what you do for a living and you tell them, they look at you as if you've just sprouted a second head because they know that real authors are millionaires with country estates and private jets who work an hour a day, languidly dictating their next bestseller to their secretary, and who the hell is this poverty-line loner freak anyway?

No, it's not a fucking lifestyle — it's a job. And if you'll excuse me, I've got a book to go write ...

Here’s the question I would ask to any Protestant considering a move: What are you saying about your past Christian experience by moving to Rome or Constantinople?  Are you willing to start going to a Eucharistic table where your Protestant friends are no longer welcome?  How is that different from Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentiles?  Are you willing to say that every faithful saint you have known is living a sub-Christian existence because they are not in churches that claim apostolic succession, no matter how fruitful their lives have been in faith, hope, and love?  For myself, I would have to agree that my ordination is invalid, and that I have never presided over an actual Eucharist.  To become Catholic, I would have to begin regarding my Protestant brothers as ambiguously situated “separated brothers,” rather than full brothers in the divine Brother, Jesus.  To become Orthodox, I would likely have to go through the whole process of initiation again, as if I were never baptized.  And what is that saying about all my Protestant brothers who have been “inadequately” baptized?  Why should I distance myself from other Christians like that?  I’m too catholic to do that.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy are impressive for their heritage, the seriousness of much of their theology, the seriousness with which they take Christian cultural engagement. Both, especially the Catholic church, are impressive for their sheer size. But when I attend Mass and am denied access to the table of my Lord Jesus together with my Catholic brothers, I can’t help wondering what really is the difference between Catholics and the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans or the Continental Reformed who practice closed communion. My Catholic friends take offense at this, but I can’t escape it: Size and history apart, how is Catholicism different from a gigantic sect? Doesn’t Orthodoxy come under the same Pauline condemnation as the fundamentalist Baptist churches who close their table to everyone outside? To become Catholic I would had to contract my ecclesial world. I would have to become less catholic – less catholic than Jesus is. Which is why I will continue to say: I’m too catholic to become Catholic.

In the ten years following the Act of Uniformity (1662), parliament passed a series of penal laws intended to suppress dissent, including two Conventicle Acts (1664, 1669), the Five Mile Act (1665), and two Test Acts (1673, 1678), in addition to the earlier Corporation Act (1661). The Corporation and Test Acts were intended to stop office-holding by dissenters. The two Conventicle Acts made it unlawful for more than five people aged 16 and over, besides the household, to ‘be present at any Assembly, Conventicle, or Meeting’ for religious worship other than that of the Church of England, and were intended to prevent ejected ministers from gathering new congregations. The Five Mile Act was intended to prevent nonconformist ministers from coming within five miles of any corporation that returned members of parliament, or any parish where they had been the minister or preached since 1660. Offenders risked a £40 fine or six months’ imprisonment. In addition, everyone who refused to conform was subject to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century recusancy laws (originally introduced against Roman Catholics) for not attending church on Sundays, or for failing to receive holy communion at least once a year.

Among the 37 million people in this country with student loans to pay off, the median balance is $12,800. A whole 72 percent of borrowers have less than $25,000 left in debt, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

FOR A VARIETY of reasons, then, human inquiry needs a synthesis, in which history and anthropology and literature and art play their parts. But there is still a deeper reason for the enduring importance of the humanities. Many scientists and commentators on science have been led to view the sciences as a value-free zone, and it is easy to understand why. When the researcher enters the lab, many features of the social world seem to have been left behind. The day’s work goes on without the need for confronting large questions about how human lives can or should go. Research is insulated because the lab is a purpose-built place, within which the rules of operation are relatively clear and well-known. Yet on a broader view, which explores the purposes and their origins, it becomes clear that judgments of the significance of particular questions profoundly affect the work done and the environments in which it is done. Behind the complex and often strikingly successful practices of contemporary science stands a history of selecting specific aspects of the world for investigation. Bits of nature do not shout out “Examine me!” Throughout history, instead, innovative scientists have built a number of lampposts under which their successors can look. It is always worth considering whether the questions that now seem most significant demand looking elsewhere for new sources of illumination.

Rethinking the humanities Ph.D. | Inside Higher Ed http://t.co/JSoaH8QR

The relationship between your iPad’s photo library and iPhoto’s internal library is a little confusing. You don’t import images into iPhoto yourself. That’s not even necessary. If a photo is “in use” by iPhoto (meaning that you’ve edited it, captioned it, Favorited it, or you’ve put it into a newfangled kind of presentation/organizational album Apple calls a “Journal”) iPhoto copies it into its own image library. Every night during my week in Ireland, I’d connect my camera to the iPad, import all of the day’s shots into the system-wide library, review them with iPhoto, and use the “Favorite” button to mark all of the ones I wanted to keep. Then I could go back into the iPad photo library and delete everything, to free up space for the next day’s photos. All of the keepers were safe inside iPhoto’s private library.

Monarchy and the Book of Common Prayer

1 May - 14 July 2012 Tuesday - Saturday & Bank Holiday Mondays 7 May & 4 June.

This exhibition traces the close relationship between royalty and religion from medieval to modern times. It tells the story of the Book of Common Prayer and its importance in national life. This story is illustrated with books, manuscripts and objects, many of which have royal or other important provenances. The centrepiece of the exhibition will be the 1662 revision of the Book of Common Prayer. Other highlights of the exhibition include:

A 1549 printing of the Book of Common Prayer
Medieval illuminated manuscripts, including the Book of Hours of Richard III
Queen Elizabeth I's personal prayer book and a copy of the book of private devotions compiled for Queen Elizabeth II in preparation for her coronation
The Book of Common Prayer used at the wedding of Queen Victoria
Charles I's own handwritten revision of State Prayers.

Classic treatises on education, such as Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, stress that education should not merely seek to impart a narrow set of practical skills. After all, the latter might just as well be obtained through apprenticeship. Instead, they were firmly convinced that education should address a more fundamental set of moral and ethical questions linked to our core values: who we are and what kind of persons we would ultimately like to become. One of the central problems of undergraduate education today is that it increasingly reinforces the “instrumentalist” view that the major decisions in life concern the efficient selection of means rather than a reflection on ends. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that higher education has been degraded to the status of an enfeebled auxiliary to reigning social and economic interests. In a society such as ours, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, perpetually inclines toward majoritarian tyranny, a liberal arts education must promote training in nonconformity.

Good analysis of why iPad apps are proving a bust for magazine publishers. http://t.co/AvzlpET1

Fiction is no mere escapist fantasy. Something about pages and print actually makes us better people. http://t.co/tOgwXHwg

Only a non-Christian would find it noteworthy that a Christian would want to imitate Jesus. http://t.co/kk1WA6oA

Writers on or introducers of Finnegans Wake regularly imagine three sorts of reader or non-reader of the book. Philip Kitcher, in Joyce’s Kaleidoscope, lists ‘those too intimidated to try to read it, those who have tried and failed, and … those who write about it’. Roger Marsh, the producer of Jim Norton’s and Marcella Riordan’s haunting audio version, names ‘new readers’, ‘readers who have never been able to make much headway’ and ‘those who already have some familiarity with the book’. For good measure, there is also Seamus Deane’s group of untimid abstainers for whom the book’s taken-for-granted unreadability becomes ‘the pseudo-suave explanation for never having read it’. Of course these three (or four) groups may represent quite different people, but it is possible (I speak for myself) for one person to belong to all of the first three: to have tried without regarding what one has been doing as a real try; to have failed by dint of not trying hard enough; and to have written about the book anyway, because ‘some familiarity’ is not entirely nothing. I take comfort from the fact that Jacques Derrida manifestly (in ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’) put himself in this category, and for such a reader the scepticism about grand schemes or total understanding that we find in the best recent criticism is very attractive. John Bishop, for example, says ‘the only way not to enjoy Finnegans Wake is to expect that one has to plod through it word by word making sense of everything in linear order.’ This is a brave claim, but it is true that the book is hard not to enjoy – it’s just even harder to cope with one’s bewilderment. Kitcher says he ‘cannot see how to read the Wake as a vast allegory of human history’, and does not believe ‘that Joyce has any great interest in large theories of history or any ambitious theses to defend in this area’. So much for Vico and Jung, and all those epic readings, like that of Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key, and even Anthony Burgess’s Here Comes Everybody. Finn Fordham, in Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, wryly says, ‘It is one of the most enduring universal myths about Finnegans Wake that it is about enduring universal myths,’ and reassuringly remarks that ‘the first impression of a mix of recognisable sense and incomprehensible nonsense will always return, however deeply immersed you get in the book.’

@millinerd You're welcome! I did a blogpost on DFW & religion a while back: http://t.co/kvP9VOu2

Not for the first time, grand theories of social evolution proved to be useless as guides to events. That has in no way dented the popularity of such theories, and it is now evolutionary psychology that is being presented as a guide for the politically perplexed. These theories show the continuing appeal of scientism—the modern belief that scientific inquiry can enable us to resolve conflicts and dilemmas in contexts where traditional sources of wisdom and practical knowledge seem to have failed. The literature of scientism has three defining features, which help explain its enduring popularity as well as its recurrent failures: large and highly speculative hypotheses are advanced to explain developments that are extremely complex and highly contingent in nature; fact and value are systematically confused; and the attractively simple theories that result are invested with the power of overcoming moral and political difficulties that have so far proved intractable.

Thirty years ago Angela Carter wrote a wonderful essay about how Empire Day (long gone now) used to be celebrated at her south London primary school, to the tune of “There’ll always be an England”. This taught her, she said, that “the idea of Britain was an English invention … Great Britain = Greater England. The greedy flag swallowed up its constituent parts.” Soon one of those parts, Scotland, may extricate itself to become independent. Then the long-predicted break-up of Britain will finally happen and English poets can call themselves English again, as Tennyson, Housman, Sassoon, Auden and Betjeman did. In the meantime, there’s the British Library exhibition to remind us what Little England and Outer Britain have in common – and what they don’t.

The best response to Amy Chua by far, a gorgeous essay by Julie Park @the_point_mag http://t.co/JzOFcBhG

In early January of 1670, the mature philosopher published his most aggressive statement of political and religious criticism, under the compound Latin title Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Anxious to avoid personal reprisals, he published it anonymously and with a cover page that misstated its place of publication as Hamburg. The measures were prudent, but ineffective. Within about three years its author was exposed and plans were afoot for seizing and suppressing all copies of his book. By the end of the 1670s the Catholic Church, eager not to be outdone, decided that the Treatise deserved a place on the Index of Prohibited Books, together with the Ethics and other opera posthuma, including his correspondence.

Steven Nadler has written a delightfully lucid and philosophically thorough account of the Treatise that helps to explain how and why this singular text became the object of such opprobrium and why we should see its appearance as “the birth of the secular age.” The general thesis is not entirely unique. The last two decades have seen an explosion of literature that celebrates Spinoza as the prophet of modernity. In 1992, Yirmiyahu Yovel authored a two-volume study on Spinoza and Other Heretics, entitled The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence, respectively, that explored the question of whether Spinoza deserved the title of “the first secular Jew.” Yovel’s answer was no, but then yes: Spinoza could not have been the first secular Jew because “the concept did not yet exist,” but he was “a lost and suspended Jew, his existential case preceding his explicit ideas and prefiguring forms of Jewish existence in which he could not himself participate.”

I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad.  Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, we’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that we’ll ever be free.

As humanists, we are inclined to read maps (to pick one example) as texts, as instruments of cultural desire, as visualizations of imperial ideology, as records of the emergence of national identity, and so forth. This is all very good. In fact, I would say it’s at the root of what it means to engage in humanistic inquiry. Almost everyone in Digital Humanities was taught to do this and loves to do this. But making a map (with a GIS system, say) is an entirely different experience. DH-ers insist – again and again – that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. It’s the thing I’ve been hearing for as I long as I’ve been in this. People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, create visualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring DH-ers to the same table. Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic – one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects. Media studies, game studies, critical code studies, and various other disciplines have brought wonderful new things to humanistic study, but I will say (at my peril) that none of these represent as radical a shift as the move from reading to making.

Partly, a model of shopping has overtaken our experience of romance. Love, historically, has been associated with a sensation of destiny. It’s very difficult for us to attain a sensation of destiny where love is concerned anymore, because we think we can always look for something better, which is essentially a shopper’s mentality. There’s no destiny when it comes to buying pants or shirts or a dress. There’ll be the nicest thing you can afford this season. But then a new season will [bring] more attractive styles and you’ll actually be able to afford something better. I think that tremendous passion that we feel other generations had and that we missed was attached to a sense of destiny, and of permanent love that would survive changes in station and opportunity and fortune.

If you read one thing about DH today, make sure it is @samplereality's new post on Deformed Humanities: http://t.co/jYs5IyGD.

According to Noble, the religion of technology constitutes “an enduring ideological tradition that has defined the dynamic Western technological enterprise since its inception.” Consequently, it’s influence is evident not only upon “professed believers and those who employ explicitly religious language,” but also on many for “whom the religious compulsion is largely unconscious, obscured by a secularized vocabulary.” This influence manifests itself in the utopian hopes attached to the technological enterprise and can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. These utopian hopes include the expectation that technology would bring about the perfection of the individual and of society and serve as a vehicle of transcendence.

I have some tools I’ve written on my GitHub page for going through Twitter. Really simple things, like, “Show me any link that’s been tweeted by more than two people I follow in the last 24 hours.” It’s configurable, so I can tag things by category. I’m able to go through all the tweets really quickly, filter out the sports tweets, because I don’t care about that, filter out the celebrity gossip, and then elevate the things that matter most.

Nick Carr on the Google Book Project and the Library of America — a good overview

Get Rich U. - There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? by Ken Auletta/New Yorker http://t.co/KUk0lmxv

I want to know more about this "blog".... RT @wrmead Do academics understand the blogosphere? Apparently not. VM essay. http://t.co/34IFxISF

What happens when you give Kindles to kids in Ghana? via @laurahazardowen Excellent article! http://t.co/Atnbc7rF

Social media are human media: @techsoc's splendid rejoinder to Turkle http://t.co/4CvmVIan via @OddLetters

A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with.

Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.

We all have our frustrations with ebooks. The problem isn’t just one of print vs electronic or Luddite vs early adopter. Even as I happily consume Kindle books on my iPad and the new Project Muse collection for work, I find that ebooks simply don’t do the things I want them to do – the things the electronic format seems to promise. In an ideal world, what would ebooks do that would make them not a substitute for print books, but better than print books? What features would make ebooks represent a true new step in the evolution of information delivery systems? Here’s what I’d like to see :

The broad import of the book is to caution us still more about simplistic views of the Graeco-Roman world as one in which texts and writing were the exclusive domain of a few elite. A few of his summarizing judgments will suffice here: “The ubiquity and pervasiveness of everyday writing in Greek is clearly visible; that in the other great metropolitan written languages, Aramaic and Latin, is less well documented but starting to come into focus as well” (141); “Even in a world where many people could not read or write, the use of written languages was not something restricted to a small, high-status group. Writing was everywhere, and a very wide range of people participated in the use of writing in some fashion” (142); whereas some have claimed that writing was restricted to “a small class of literate mediators,” in fact “writing was far more pervasive and important than that; it was used all the time for private, informal, spontaneous, and ephemeral communications, writing for which one would not wish to spend the time and money to go to a professional scribe” (142).

Bagnall’s book offers another strong reason to avoid playing off “orality” against “textuality”, and should further caution those biblical scholars who have done so on the basis of an inadequate consideration of the evidence. Early Christianity emerged in a world heavily shaped by texts of many kinds, and was, in fact, in that very textual world itself a movement remarkably given to the production, reading, copying and circulation of texts.

World collide! RT @wilsonquarterly: First up: @EthanZ on the meaning of increased global connection http://t.co/ORdIB6Fw #longreads

This last point is the key, I think, to the New Aesthetic, in that it embodies the fact that all are creators (and hence programmers) and all are users (and hence programmed). While those of us ensconced in our ivory silos may be tempted to think that lesser persons who cannot code make up the new underclass, there are very few people who now are not digital content creators using visual toolkits to build complex digital objects. Creating something with the richness and reach of a WordPress blog is now so easy that the digerati mock it as not being real digital creation, rather than acknowledging the growing ease and sophistication of digital work. Creating complex data-driven maps is so simple now that you need not ever have taken a GIS course, much less become a GIS professional as was necessary a decade ago, and the result is a growing sense of disdain for all the new cartographers who can produce an amazing map without knowing what a datum is.1

At the end of the eighteenth-century, as my colleague Mark Algee-Hewitt has shown, it was incredibly popular to talk about the problems of print media — in print. Once again, you can see the problem. Talking about why something is bad in the very medium you are critiquing only adds to the problem you are talking about — which of course is good for you if you are trying to make money from what you are talking about. The commercialization of writing in the eighteenth century was one of the primary reasons why it became so logical to speak in such illogical ways.

For me, all of this raises the question of how we say goodbye to media. How can you speak about leaving something or giving something up in the medium that you are giving up? How do we let go of certain kinds of mediation in our lives? Erard provides a brilliant answer: the point is not the fake departures, but the estrangement of return. Reactivating your Facebook account, no less than giving up books for a while, “is like coming back to your country after a month in a foreign land, and it makes one feel that the whole reason for leaving is to make the place seem strange again.”

Instead of the on-and-on of social media or the permanently-off of the technological exile, we need more ways of facilitating temporary closure, something like the pleasure of putting a book down and picking it up again at a later date.

Computing pioneer Lee Felsenstein has spoken about the direct influence Tools for Conviviality on his work. For him, Illich's description of radio as a convivial tool in Central America was a model for computer development: "The technology itself was sufficiently inviting and accessible to them that it catalyzed their inherent tendencies to learn. In other words, if you tried to mess around with it, it didn't just burn out right away. The tube might overheat, but it would survive and give you some warning that you had done something wrong. The possible set of interactions, between the person who was trying to discover the secrets of the technology and the technology itself, was quite different from the standard industrial interactive model, which could be summed up as 'If you do the wrong thing, this will break, and God help you.' ... And this showed me the direction to go in. You could do the same thing with computers as far as I was concerned." Felsenstein described the first meeting of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, where 30 or so people tried to understand the Altair together, as "the moment at which the personal computer became a convivial technology."

What Facebook offers is the dream of managing the social and curating the self, and we seem to obsessively take to the task. The asynchronicity of Facebook is rather safe, after all, when compared to the messy and risky dynamics of face-to-face interactions and we naturally gravitate toward this sort of safety. I suspect this is in part also why we would sometimes rather text than call and, if we do call, why we hope to get sent to voicemail. It seems reasonable to ask whether we will be tempted to take the efficiency and smoothness of our social media interactions as the norm for all forms of social interaction.

Lite intimacies in social media create a background din of disclosure, confession, closeness, and familiarity. It isn’t inherently fake or objectionable, and if it were only a semantic problem, I wouldn’t be concerned. But there is danger, it seems to me, of losing our coordinates. There’s a danger that the lite intimacies of the sentimental culture might deplete the resources of our true intimacies. If the intimate building blocks that once belonged mostly to a domestic partner or family—the sharing of a million little details about our moods, and what we ate for breakfast, and our daily rituals and secret gripes—now belong to everyone on Facebook in the world of lite intimacy, then how much deeper do we need to go to find the everyday material out of which to recognize, solidify, and build that deeper intimacy? Do we have to scream emotions louder to be heard over the cacophony of the lite intimacy? A mild hypothesis for the new social life of our age: the easier it is to be close but not intimate in public, the easier it is to be close but not intimate in private.

and other Apple shirts

This information about calories, carbohydrates and the alcohol content of the beers listed here comes from many sources. Send additions and corrections to editor@realbeer.com.

For purposes of consistency, calories and carbs are based on 12-ounce servings. Alcohol content is listed by volume (a beer that is 4.0% by volume is about 3.2% by weight).

Bring some friends to share a bottle and a copper pot bubbling with Bertrand Bluy’s market-inspired dish of the day. The fixed menu offers great value but no choices – those looking for variety should turn their attention to the impressive wine shelf.

Located in the heart of the aristocratic quarter, on Paris’ Left Bank, Hôtel de Lille is both charming and cordial. A stone’s throw from the d’Orsay and Louvre museums and from the famous Saint-Germain-des-Prés area, it is surrounded by ideal strolling ground, with its fair share of antique stores, typically Parisian bistros, and the famous second-hand bookstalls, along the banks of the River Seine. Hôtel de Lille is renowned for its warm, welcoming atmosphere and impeccable cleanliness. The rooms are air-conditioned and fitted with WiFi. Breakfast is served as per Parisian baker tradition, in the vaulted “Saint-Germain” room - a vestige of the cellars that help characterize the neighborhood.

Next >

For hundreds of years, scholars have carefully studied the plays of Shakespeare, breaking down the language and carefully dissecting every act and scene. We thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of computational insights Wolfram|Alpha could provide, so we uploaded the complete catalog of Shakespeare’s plays into our database. This allows our users to examine Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, and the rest of the Bard’s plays in an entirely new way.

Entering a play into Wolfram|Alpha, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brings up basic information, such as number of acts, scenes, and characters. It also provides more in-depth info like longest word, most frequent words, number of words and sentences, and more. It’s also easy to find more specific information about a particular act or scene with queries like “What is the longest word in King Lear?”, “What is the average sentence length of Macbeth?”, and “How many unique words are there in Twelfth Night?”.

The answer to that question is “maybe.” If you’ve devoted yourself to media studies, you might be hot. Your work is often solidly focused on the digital, after all. But when people say “digital humanities,” maybe they mean something different? And maybe they mean something that’s not what you do? Maybe you’re a theorist, in any of its ramified forms (including race and gender studies). Surely every form of discourse is capable of being theorized, and there seems to be a dearth of such theorization in digital humanities itself. But what if digital humanities isn’t a fertile, open ground for theorization, but a discipline hostile to it—or worse, the very thing that is slouching forward to supplant theory as a hot thing? Maybe you’re just an ordinary historian or a literary critic or a classicist. You use computers, of course, and you’re interested in what they might mean for the future of humanistic study. But what if this hot thing means that what you do—your work on Paradise Lost, or the French Revolution, or the writings of the late Roman Stoics—is now old fashioned, out of step, or even irrelevant?

The question likewise hangs over people who are, by all accounts, squarely doing digital humanities. You might have devoted yourself to something like data mining, or GIS, or TEI, or tool building. This, surely, is digital humanities. But then perhaps such things can’t survive the withering, highly articulate attacks of the theorists (or, for that matter, the old-fashions). Maybe this is just a passing thing. Don’t you have your own doubts about it even as you engage in it? Maybe they’re right; maybe the whole thing is subtly retrograde—even reactionary. It’s undoubtedly limited—just one piece, just one form, just one thing, in the overall task of explicating the human record. But maybe it’s not enough? And can it possibly live up to the hype?

New post by Matthew Battles on the MLH website on the New Aesthetic & emergent virtual taste.

In the wake of... http://t.co/rNwP9QHJ

Pressure cooking is not a consolation prize. The key is knowing when to do it. People who cook beans or make stock should own one. Same goes for those who love risotto; they’ll learn, after one bite, that pressure cooking carnaroli makes a flawless texture.

For some time now I’ve been using a TextExpander snippet to insert the URL of the frontmost Safari tab into whatever I’m writing.1 Initially I was using TypeIt4Me to do this, but because of some funny results on my G4 iBook, I switched to TextExpander. Today it dawned on me that I don’t have to restrict myself to the frontmost tab—I can write snippets to get the URL of any tab. So I did.

All monster and no linguistic-cultural roundedness, like a cake that’s all icing and no sponge, cloys. The irony is that The Lord of the Rings is centrally interested in culture, history and—above all—language; Tolkien worked for decades at the novel, and much of that work involved him lovingly crafting the context for his story. And, to go back to his ‘Monsters and Critics’ lecture, his larger point is that world and monster rely upon each other for their artistic success—that to use a term he would have hated, their relationship is dialectical. Monsters ought not to be befanged CGI diversions; they ought to embody the myth in history. Without them history is too dry; but without their embedding history they are too cardboard.

Is it easy to be a Marxist?’ Louis Althusser put this question to a crowded audience at the University of Picardy in 1975. Is it possible to be an Althusserian? The question has to be asked now. Althusserian Marxism has always been under threat, but since the tragic events of last November we are obliged to wonder whether the ruin of Althusser’s own life and career, as he faces a future necessarily bounded by the mental hospital, will also encompass the definitive destruction of his philosophical work. If so, Althusser’s story has a very real relevance to the history of the French Left.

What should be apparent from this brief discussion of the principles of abduction and pattern-matching in computer science is their creative possibilities for generating results from data sets. The ability to generate hypothesises on the basis of data, which is fallible and probabilistic allows for computational devices to generate forecasts and predictions based on current and past behaviours, data collection, models, and images. It is this principle of abductive reason which makes computational reasoning different from instrumental reason, and particularly from the iron-cage of logical implication or programmatic outcome that instrumental reason suggests.

Anthony Grafton says books will be vital for at least a generation. So why get rid of them, as NYPL is doing, now? http://t.co/Fj2kD1kr

@GradHacker makes a compelling case for attending and supporting @thatcamp: http://t.co/BLWgAm8f

Here goes a short _ebr_ piece I wrote about _Watchmen_ and media studies. http://t.co/FUmEN6tQ

At Grinnell College in Iowa, students can take “The Digital Age,” which covers the “great ideas in the field of computer science, focusing on underlying algorithmic principles and social implications.” But it does not entail learning a programming language.

“ ‘Literacy’ implies reading and writing, so ‘computer literacy’ suggests that writing programs is a required skill for activity under this name,” says Henry M. Walker, a computer science professor at Grinnell. “However, general citizens may or may not have to write programs to function effectively in this technological age.” He prefers to promote “computer fluency,” attainable without assignments in programming.

Someday, the understanding of computational processes may be indispensable for people in all occupations. But it’s not yet clear when we’ll cross that bridge from nice-to-know to must-know

So, what’s disrupting courses and the formal curriculum? If they are no longer the essential center of the undergraduate experience, what is? In 2008, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) published a now-familiar list of what is referred to as “high‑impact practices.”4 These are the college experiences that highly correlate to the most powerful learning outcomes. Students’ participation in one or more of these practices had the greatest impact on success, on retention, on graduation, on transfer, and on other measures of learning:

First-year seminars and experiences
Common intellectual experiences
Learning communities
Writing-intensive courses
Collaborative assignments and projects
Undergraduate research
Diversity / global learning (study abroad)
Service learning, community-based learning
Internships
Capstone courses and projects

In the early 20th Century, most of the professions came to see autonomy and self-governance as the precondition of providing high-value artisanal service to both elite and mass clientele. The relations the professions created to clients were simultaneously intimate and impersonal. Patients sought doctors they could personally trust but that trust was a product of the doctor’s calling to a vocation with values and obligations bigger than his own interests. Businesses and governments looked for auditors who were independent but also had a skilled and sympathetic understanding of fiduciary workings. And students looked for teachers who were committed to an educational mission bigger than themselves but who also taught out of a fiercely independent and individualized vision of craft. Think of the exalted archetypes of teaching in 20th Century fiction for examples, like Mr. Chips or David Powlett-Jones.

The post-industrial service and knowledge-based economies of the last thirty years have relentlessly chipped away at the autonomy of the professions, because professions are service. They could no more be allowed a semi-monopolistic right to set their own value than artisans and guilds could be allowed to continue to set the value of clothing or printing in the face of early industrialization. I’m not playing with metaphors here: I think it’s a pretty close analogy. And as an analogy, it lets us see both what will be gained and lost if the David Levys of the new economy manage to enclose all the professions, all forms of knowledge work.