Poem In Your Pocket Day

Today, 14 April 2011, is Poem In Your Pocket Day. I wrote about this noble celebration last year and I won’t add much to that post except to report what poem I am carrying: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I have several extra poems in tow so please do find me for a copy or print your own.

What poem are you carrying today?

Brave New Media Conference

On Saturday, I will be attending (and briefly speaking at) the Brave New Media Conference on the campus of Harding University in Searcy, AR. The conference is hosted by the HU chapter of the Roosevelt Institute and the Harding University College of Communication. Though the subject title is new media, the conference will focus primarily on social media and how it affects our lives in and outside the academy. Topics of discussion range from pedagogy to weather to philanthropy. There’s no cost for attendance and there are a variety of subjects up for discussion. All of the talks revolve around social media and the keynote speakers come from a variety of industries and interests. It should be a good time.

My class/breakout session is called “EduPunks, Tweets, and Textbooks: Using Social Media to Fight the Commercialization of the Classroom.” Sure, the title is a bit much–especially since I recently agreed that EduPunk is dead (long live EduPunk?)–but I am looking forward to the subjects.

More information about the conference can be found on its site, schedule, twitter, or facebook. I hope to see you there.

As a bonus, the excellent Midnight Oil Coffee House is mere minutes from Harding U’s campus and will be a welcoming environment for further discussion after/between sessions.

Day of DH 2011

Today, March 18th 2011, is the Day in the Life of Digital Humanities according to the good people at TAPoR. In an effort to publicize what digital humanists do in their everyday lives, those who sign up are encouraged to blog (at least thrice) about what their #dayofdh held. TAPoR hosts blogs for each participant and will eventually gather and archive all of the entries. Though I am not certain, I am sure someone there is also gathering the tweets related to the Day of DH and will archive those, too.

Instead of cross posting my entries, I will simply link to the blog hosted on the Day of DH WP multisite build. Click here for my entries there.

The Pale King’s First Sentence

As April 15th approaches, excitement for the release of David Foster Wallace’s new novel is growing. This morning, The Millions posted the first sentence of The Pale King. With this brief taste, some reviews, and previously published excerpts, I am awfully excited to read this novel.

Perhaps I am too much of a DFW fan to accurately analyze the coming work, but I find this sentence to be breathtaking. In one (albeit rather long) sentence, he wraps up a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge in an accurate description of a mid-western American landscape. Tax day can’t come soon enough.

While I have been trying to avoid the fetishization of DFW since his too-early death, I cannot resist re-posting these first lines:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Scholarly Serendipity

Dan Cohen recently delivered a talk on what scholars want from a digital library at a Digital Public Library of America meeting. Reading his observations of scholars and their research habits forced me to reflect on my own research habits and my frequent reliance on serendipity in the stacks.

Cohen’s first point is that scholars want reliable metadata about books and other objects in the digital library. After all, we must assume that the information associated with a text is accurate before we can begin to trust the content of the text.

His second point is that most digital archives of scholarly material remove the element of serendipity–accidentally stumbling upon a source while searching for something else or discovering that a book had been mis-shelved but the text in its place fit in perfectly with your project–from much modern research.

Jonathan Rochkind’s first comment on Cohen’s article hints toward this, but I believe that most of my serendipitous finds in the library stacks have been because of metadata error. On several occasions, a mislabeled book sent me to shelves that I otherwise would never have visited only to lead me to a text that fit a need I didn’t yet know I had had. Too often, keywords were of no help in the initial searching but combing a general area once a good text was stumbled upon was usually fruitful.

Cohen and (I am sure) other participants in the meeting offered solutions to the problem of serendipity such as “more like this” links, “sample collections,” and even social connection spaces, and I believe all of those would help allow serendipity to run its course–especially if we allow some metadata to remain incorrect. Even if they’re digital, you never quite know what you’ll find in the stacks.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Oldtasty]