Collin Vs. Blog

Derek made the eminently reasonable suggestion that I give myself one or two "hiatus coupons," redeemable for those moments when I can't not blog. I've come close to redeeming them over the past week, but managed to restrain myself.

Anyhow, one of my aims in taking the hiatus was to put in some serious writing time (and I mean serious time for writing rather than time for serious writing. Heh.). Among my goals for this time was a draft of an essay that I'd like to send out to CCC sometime in the near future, and that draft is now complete-ish, awaiting feedback from eyes more critical than mine are at the moment. The piece is called "A Book of Stars: Slicing, Scaling, and Data Mining Our Discipline," and for the moment, I've posted a pdf version of it for anyone who'd like to feed me back on it.

I post it here mostly because it takes up issues, about the CCCC specifically, that I've raised in this space on occasion. It also partakes of a 2002 CCCC presentation I did on the way that we use the program as a map of the field (and mistakenly so, imho). There's some social software goodness in there as well, and a quick read of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink lined up with Kenneth Burke's famous reflection/selection/deflection. Coincidentally, that's the presentation I'll be giving at Penn State in a couple of months.

Okay, now I'm just babbling. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure that the coupon doesn't include that as one of the permissible activities.

Update: There are some parallels in my argument and the stuff that Clay Shirky's talking about in "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags". It may be worth my time to make that parallel a little more explicit.