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September 29, 2006

Hurdles

It's hard to know how general or specific I'm supposed to be with regard to blogging about tenure, and so my solution in general has been to lay off that particular topic, despite the fact that it occupies more than its fair share of my waking thoughts. (No tenure dreams so far, knock on wood.)

Anyhow, I think I can safely say, without getting into specifics, that I have successfully passed the first stage. (The question isn't whether I've passed, but rather how much to say.)

One of the things that makes me uncomfortable about the process is the degree to which it requires a great deal of work on the parts of many people around me. Not that it didn't require work of me, too, but then, I expect/hope to benefit pretty directly from the work that I did. The fact that I may benefit from other people's work, though, is more humbling.

So although this won't be the last time, let me publicly thank all of my colleagues, both local and extended, whose efforts have gone into my tenure case. There's a fair bit of delay before it'll go through the next stage, but I'm sure that I'll be updating as it does.

That's all.

September 26, 2006

Rhetopia?

(Note: I've been sitting on this post for about three days, and gotten to the point where it's keeping me from blogging other stuff. So rather than polish it up, I'm just going to post it.)

Now that the MLA job list has been released, it's been a bit of a challenge for me to turn my thoughts to questions of my upcoming job hunt. After all, this is the first time in six years that I've had to think about searching. I've been solicited for the occasional position, but honestly, not having to assemble materials, worry about MLA, or submit myself to the jaded scrutiny of search committees is in my opinion one of the advantages of the tenure-track. And there are real differences between searching for entry-level positions as an assistant professor and considering more senior positions--I'm only looking at advanced assistant or associate gigs this time round.

Part of it is that there are very specific reasons for requesting senior hires. They require more money, and one of the secret places that colleges balance their budgets is by maxing out the salary differential between retiring faculty and their entry-level replacements. Senior hires screw with that dynamic, and are thus much rarer. Still, there are times where it's warranted, and if you scan the available positions for senior folks in my field, you'll see what I mean. With very few exceptions, you'll find jobs that are explicit about the desire for middle management candidates: established scholar-teachers who can step into a program with minimal fuss and take over the administration of writing centers, writing programs, a large staff of teachers, etc.

Without getting too snarky about it, there are many positions where universities have acknowledged the expertise of rhetcompers, but that acknowledgment has yet to enter into the curricular calculations of the hiring department. And we've all heard the stories about how even search committees haven't really thought through what it means to hire, consider, host, or converse with rhetcomp candidates. I could get specific on either count, but I probably don't need to.

I'm still deciding about where I'm going to apply, but I've basically decided that I'm going to be forthright about it. There are good reasons for me to apply widely (e.g., leverage), but I've been on too many committees to feel good about applying for positions that I have no earthly intention of pursuing. For one thing, I'm not that great a liar. For another, there's a great deal of emotional and intellectual labor that goes into a search, and if someone's going to take the time to read my materials, they deserve some minimal amount of respect from me for doing it. If I'm not willing to go there, then it's disingenuous of me to apply.

And no, that doesn't reduce my list of possible applications to zero.

But what I've been thinking about lately is exactly what I would expect/want/need if I were to move. Some of those things are personal, certainly, and some are matters of taste. But I've had a couple of conversations in the past few days, where I've been thinking out loud about what makes a "good program" in rhetcomp. And I mean this specifically from the perspective of a potential senior hire--what makes a program attractive to people at the stage that I'm at?

So for example, if I were advising a PhD applicant looking at programs, placement would be a big issue. What structures are in place to help their students find positions, and how successful are they at it, both in terms of percentages and in terms of position quality? That stuff matters to me as someone who does a lot of that work locally, but it doesn't fall into the category of "make or break" for me as I look at programs. Make sense?

(I should note from the getgo that I'm only really interested in other PhD programs. I went to a liberal arts school for college, and have taught at a really good MA-granting program, but for me, a doctoral program takes advantage of my greatest strengths as an instructor, in my opinion. At some point in my career, that may change, but not right now.)

So here are some of the things I've come up with. I may add a post or two later on as I think through this stuff, but feel free to add things in the comments as well...

1. A critical mass of faculty

How many rhetcomp faculty are enough to maintain a thriving program? I'm tempted to say at least 8-10, and almost as tempted to go back and change that to say double digits. Does that mean that smaller faculties are somehow less than real? Of course not. But in terms of curricular variety and in terms of sharing exam and dissertation load, it's hard for me to imagine not feeling stretched pretty thin without that many colleagues. I may be relying too heavily on my own experience in a freestanding program without an MA, but if a program is admitting 3-5 PhDs in rhetcomp a year, as we do, and graduating them at the same rate, as we try to do, then 8-10 seems modest enough. Feel free to disagree, though.

2. An articulated rhetcomp curriculum

I don't expect that other programs have the degree of control that we do at SU over graduate curriculum (or undergraduate, for that matter). But still. Rhetcomp students have certain curricular needs (methods, e.g.) that literature students do not, and vice versa (e.g., foreign language requirements, although how much of a need is debatable). I think that a good program is necessarily one where the rhetcomp faculty have some say over how their students are treated curricularly, i.e., not as lit students who take a pedagogy course or two. That definitely means different courses, and it may even mean different procedures, honestly.

3. Sponsored Networking

This may happen in the form of external events (e.g., Watson or the Penn State Conference) or internal (in the form of ongoing Speaker Series, annual symposia, etc.), but good programs set aside the resources to bring in people. (Sending the program's faculty and students outward in the form of travel support is also important, but not quite enough.)

4. The Vision Thing

This can be many different things, and perhaps this is a sign of my quasi-administrative status, but more and more, I find that I'm impatient with programs where the vision is just "keep on keepin on." Y'know? I have my own opinions about what a responsible vision is, and I know that it's not the only one, but having some long-term goals to work towards feels more important to me than it used to, and I think good programs think beyond the immediate semester. Not all the time, and it's not to say that their plans can't change, but some sort of guiding vision is a good thing.

5. Doing unto others

I wish that this went without saying, but I think that part of a program's vision has to include how everyone in the department is treated, not just the TT faculty. If nothing else, everyone in an English department has some sort of stake in the teaching of FYC, and how they account for that stake and support or neglect it institutionally is one of the things I think about.

* * * * *

So those are five things I'll think about this fall as I consider where to apply, and as I go deeper into the process. I could say much more about each of them, but considering that this entry has been clogging up my blogging passages for the last few days, I'm going to post it, and add as I feel like it...

September 21, 2006

A Tale of Two Telecities

A couple of the more attractive ensemble shows debuted this week, and I made time to catch them. Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and JJ Abrams's Six Degrees both started out pretty well. I'll withhold judgment until I'm a few shows in, but one difference stood out to me.

At the end of 60, NBC explains that if I missed any of tonight's episode, I can go over to the NBC site and catch a "two minute recap." Contrast that with ABC's approach, which also requires me to visit their site, but offers me the entire episode, and for free. Heck, just for kicks, I may go watch the episode again. The two minute recap? I've already seen next week's "two-minute recap"--it's called the tease for the next episode.

NBC already embarrassed themselves by taking on YouTube, so it doesn't surprise me too much that they would demonstrate again their utter unawareness of what the Web might do for them. What's unfortunate is that someone like Sorkin--whose episodes are probably among the least effectively reduced to a 2-minute tease--has to suffer for the network's shortsightedness. They're jumping on the "season arc" bandwagon with some of their shows, but they still don't get that making the first few episodes as available as possible will only pay off in the long run, a long run that the shows themselves require. Ah well.

That's all. I need to blog Scott McCloud's visit, and I'll try and do that tomorrow...

Update: Okay, clearly I need to just take all of this back, and pull my head out. Sorry about that. I was totally wrong. I'm not sure why they would just plug the 2-minute replay instead of the full episode, but both are available on NBC's site, even for the crappy shows.

September 18, 2006

So that's how it works!

I have a folder on my desktop that I've been gradually filling for almost two years now. I probably add something once a month or so. Maybe I'll pull something off of a delicious bookmark, or I'll see a link to a pdf through Bloglines, and just dump it in.

So anyway, I didn't have a "next" thing to read about 10 days ago, so I went into that folder and grabbed a pdf. Turns out it was James Moody's "The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999." I read it right before I left for Jeff & Jenny's wedding, so I marked it up some with the intent of bookblogging it. Before I could do so, I was browsing my blog stats, and found some visits from a site I hadn't seen before, and followed the link, coincidentally enough, to the page of a grad student who's working with Moody.

Which was enough to send me browsing through the various pages associated with the Sociology department at Ohio State, including Moody's, which took me to the page for his course on Theories of Social Action. And although there are lots of texts both there and on other pages that ended up in that desktop folder of mine, the one that happened to catch my eye was Mustafa Emirbayer's "Manifesto for a Relational Sociology" (JSTOR), which of course I've now read and intend to bookblog as well.

And in the works cited for Emirbayer's essay, I happened to see an entry from David Kaufer, whose Rhetoric and the Arts of Design I'm a fan of. And it turns out that he and Kathleen Carley wrote an essay on semantic connectivity back in 1993, which of course is next on my list and will be bookblogged once I do. But the emphasis on relational sociology (as opposed to sociologies that assume substance) in Emirbayer's essay connects for me with Latour (whom Emirbayer cites), which is close to the top of my brainpile thanks to Jenny's post.

But it's Debbie's post, along with the comment about verbing rhetoric, that reminds me that I need to go back and dig up Michel Serres' stuff about philosophy that would focus primarily not on nouns or verbs, but rather on prepositions. And the appeal for me of the word pre/position, as something both that is relational and that precedes the stasis of positioning, clicks together pretty nicely with Massumi (whom Debbie also mentions) and Jenny both.

That it inches me closer to the things I want to say, by this point, is almost gravy. That's how it works.

McCloud revisited

Awesome.

After whining about not being able to go to Rochester today to see Scott McCloud, I learned that in fact, he's coming to Syracuse on Wednesday, in an event remarkably free from any sort of local promotion. Not only that, but it's at a time on Wednesday that doesn't conflict with any meetings. Not only that, but my copy of Making Comics (Amazon) arrived in time for me to have him sign it.

Not only that.

Update: Not only that, but I'll get to see Art Spiegelman the following evening. I'll probably bring in my copy of In the Shadow of No Towers for signin', mostly because I think Maus I & II are boxed up somewhere...

September 16, 2006

one list, two list,

There was a letter to the editor in the SU paper this week that I happened to see, despite the fact that I don't pay a whole lot of attention to said periodical. This letter complained about the words whitelist and blacklist, for their reinforcement of particular attitudes towards white and black folk.

I have to admit that my first reaction to complaints like these is to come down on the side of language, which pretty much does what it does without paying particular attention to the complaints or efforts of we individual speakers. But it stuck with me. I make a real effort to avoid gendered terms in my writing, and I've always been a fan of Douglas Hofstadter's Person Paper on Purity in Language. And, as it happens, I'm slowly assembling a list of the email addresses of valid commenters, so that all y'all don't continue to fall afoul of the tighter spam restrictions I've had to adopt lately.

Even though the plugin itself that allows me to do this is called Whitelister, I think I'm going to describe what I'm doing as red- and greenlisting. I don't fool myself into believing that this terminological change is going to sweep the country like wildfire or anything, but making reference to traffic signals actually comes closer to describing what I'm trying to accomplish.

So if your comment doesn't show up for a spell, please be patient. I'll add you to the ol' greenlist...

That's all.

September 15, 2006

The off-4Cson

My title only works when you understand that 4Cs is pronounced "four seas." I'm just saying.

Unless you happen to be involved with the behind-the-scenes work of the conference, there are basically 2 times during the year when the dreams of rhetcompers turn to their annual conference. The first, and most elaborate, is March, when the conference itself happens. The second, though, is right now, the week when notifications are made for the following March. Word on the street is that the conference acceptance rate is now hovering somewhere around 33%--that there were maybe 600 accepted out of about 1800 submissions. Hard to know exactly how those numbers play out--some proposals are for 3-5 person panels and some individual--but still, it's a pretty big deal.

So it was a little aggravating this week, as everyone was receiving their notifications, to not receive my own. I did hear about a panel that I'm chairing, but that only served to confirm that my email was indeed working. As I noted a couple of years ago,

Notification is always something of an odd season around grad programs--on the one hand, CCCC is selective enough that you expect a little bit of congratulations; on the other, no one really asks anyone else, for fear that they didn't get accepted.

So I pretty much just kept my mouth shut, and vowed to give it a few days, figuring that if I hadn't heard by this weekend, I'd fire off a Monday email to see. Well, my patience was rewarded with the news today that Deb Holdstein, Derek, and I will be doing a Featured Session at the 2007 CCCC, one where we talk about the relationship between the journal, both print and online, and the discipline. Rock. Roll.

I think the plan to is to do some revising to the text of our abstract, and perhaps even the title, so once that's done, I'll be sure to post it here. In the meantime, I'm just going to sit back and bask in the glow of the fact that our work on CCCO is going to be featured in disciplinary primetime. CCCC was really the last piece of a speaking puzzle for the year that includes four (four!) different conferences and perhaps a job talk or two. Hence the whole lot of talking that I referred to a couple of days back. And hence the recent addition to my speakerly arsenal. I can't guarantee that I'll be good, but I'll almost certainly be better.

That's the plan, anyway.

September 14, 2006

Retromediation

Here's a little question for you:

I was talking with a colleague last night who teaches some of our professional writing and/or technology courses. He and I were talking and he asked me if there was a term for this phenomenon: not so long ago, when he would ask his students if they had ever heard the word hypertext or had authored web pages (via HTML, CSS, etc), most of them hadn't. And he had the sense that they hadn't yet arrived at that point. Now, though, he asks these questions, and has the impression not that his students haven't arrived there yet, but that they're beyond it and would think of it as backsliding. In other words, given all the SNApps, like blogging software, Facebook, MySpace, etc., there's been an emphasis on allowing users to avoid ever having to go under the hood, such that the idea of teaching those under-the-hood skills like coding may start to appear quaint.

Anyhow, my colleague asked me if there was a term for this, and the best I could come up with was leapfrogging, although I think I've heard of it more in the context of diffusion studies, where particular societies will skip intermediate steps in a particular line of development for whatever reason.

I also thought that retromediation might make for a workable term, in the sense of these interfaces remediating particular skill sets, but doing so in a way that makes the skills themselves seem "retro." Maybe I'm overreacting to what is unquestionably a limited sample, but I wonder if being able to tweak one's own HTML and CSS isn't rapidly becoming akin to being able to keep your truck running with a coat hanger and duct tape. Useful, yes, but also a little old school.

Then I look up the word, and find that Derek's already coined it, albeit in a more punceptual fashion than I'm using it.

Hmm. Just thinking, I suppose, with the question implied. That's all.

September 13, 2006

Comic zen

There are days where I wish I could do more with Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen than just send adulatory links his way. But oh well. He has a great piece on translating Scott McCloud's work on comics into presentations. Maybe it's more accurate to say that he's talking about learning from comics when it comes to presentations. Either way, as I gear up for what will be several talks this year, I'm going to keep going back to PZ over and over as I plan out this year's presentations. You should, too.

Update: It is a conspiracy. McCloud is giving a talk next Monday in Rochester, and where will I be? Yes, that's right. At a faculty meeting. AARGH.

September 9, 2006

As for where I was for the last 48 hours

This should explain it.

Yes, that's me 1/4 responsible for keeping the chuppah adequately aloft.

Congratulations, Jeff & Jenny!!

Oh. My. Football. Gods.

1. A win is a win is a win is a win.
2. 6 d-line stuffs from inside the 2 yard line!
3. How important is Drew Tate?
4. How dumb does the decision to sit Tate look?
5. How many games are won by the team that loses the turnover battle 4-0?

Iowa deserved to lose that game and Syracuse probably deserved to win it, but I'm going to enjoy Iowa's attempt to make a BCS bowl game more than I would have enjoyed waiting for SU's 2nd win, so I'm content. Of course, I fully expect the Hawks to lose ground in the polls this week, and deservedly so.

September 6, 2006

Express Written Permission

I'd planned earlier today on simply posting the following, a draft of a future amendment to my syllabi:

Any rebroadcast, reproduction or account of this course is forbidden without the express written permission of the instructor, the Writing Program and Syracuse University.

But then, thanks to the sp4mm3rz, I hit a cgi ceiling with my webhost, and it caused my MT installation to sputter and die. As I was in the middle of upgrading to 3.3, I figured that I had done something horribly wrong, and thus spent hours undoing it, redoing it, having it still not work, then repeating the cycle three or four more times. I'm persistent like that.

And then I finally submitted a support ticket, and my lovely webhost solved my problem in 10 seconds.

So that's why the occasional bouts of unworkiness.

September 5, 2006

Keepin on

Paul has a nice reply to my earlier post, Derek's, as well as the comments that Jeff and I left over at his place. A couple of quick things I wanted to mention, maybe to pick up later:

I also feel that reading the professional literature has become much easier. I know what to read carefully (and several times) and what to skim through quickly because I can often predict where I might find certain arguments or pieces of information because of my genre knowledge. Sometimes I can even predict what the text is going to say before reading it based on my knowledge of what's been said and done; in those cases, reading is a matter of confirming my predictions and noting any discrepancies.

That's something that I should have mentioned but didn't, the fact that it does get easier. The advantage of any relatively closed network of texts is that we read for content, yes, but we also read for the strategies and tropes that frame that content. I like "genre knowledge" as a description of it. While it may be somewhat disconcerting to realize that there really aren't all that many ways to say what we have to say, I've always found that it makes my reading easier, too.

And lately, in the past year or two, I've really become interested in the kinds of mental mapping that we inevitably do as scholars. My personal crusade has been to think of ways that this mapping can be aggregated so that we aren't each reinventing the wheel, but on a smaller scale, I've been asking my students (in the last 3 grad courses I've taught) to really think explicitly about mapping as knowledge production.

And that's part of what I mean by managing the collection of academic texts and ideas. I think that there are intermediate steps between reading on the one hand and writing on the other, steps that can, if not shorten the distance between the two, at least allow us to make the transition with more certainty.

The tools that we're using to put together CCC Online are almost all available to anyone with a web browser, and I think they're scalable to the individual user pretty easily. Paul's right to note at the end of his entry that it's crucial to reach a critical mass, though, which is the flip side of the sustainability argument that I make. Any system must be simple enough to accomplish on a regular basis, and done often enough that it achieves critical mass. I look at the tag cloud emerging from our work with del.icio.us, and while it's only a map of 11 or so years of the journal, I feel like it gives me a pretty good idea of that span. And when you add in the fact that the tags themselves link out to specific essays, it's a pretty darn useful little "paragraph." Imagine having a cloud like this for each of several exam lists, for example:

I'm going to be doing some experimenting over the next couple of weeks to try and make our own process even more useful and streamlined. With a little luck, I'll be posting about it soon enough. But this is one of the ways that a collection might be managed to a scholar's advantage, emerging or no...

That's all.

My office has a theme song

At least for the next couple of days.

September 4, 2006

Collections vs Conversations

Derek's citation of an entry over at Paul Matsuda's blog tripped a bit of a switch for me this evening, and the result is probably going to be a sizable post. Buckle your seat belt.

What I want to take issue with, ever so slightly, is the tried and true bit of wisdom that entering academia is a matter of "joining the conversation." We're fond, in rhetcomp, of Kenneth Burke's passage from Philosophy of Literary Form, as a metaphor for disciplinarity:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

There are critiques of the Habermasian character of the Burkean parlor, but that's not my concern. My concern is with the ease with which "putting in one's oar" is translated into the nominalism of "publication." As in, I need a publication, or to get a publication, or I don't have enough publications. I'm being somewhat specific here: I'm objecting to "publication" as a thing you have as opposed to "publishing" as an activity you engage in. And thus my concern is also with how we translate "listen for a while," because I think that's key for publishing (and perhaps less of an emphasis in publication).

For the past couple of years, I've been handing out Paul Matsuda's chapter "Coming to Voice: Publishing as a Graduate Student," from Casanave and Vandrick's Writing for Scholarly Publication (Amazon). In fact, I wrote about it, almost exactly a year ago, in the context of a discussion about the ongoingness of blogging. So it was kind of cool to see Paul repeat some of that essay in a blog entry a couple of weeks back. And it reminded me about why I hand out his chapter in the first place.

I wrote a year ago that "What's important about the essay is that it narrates a process that's not about acquiring disciplinary content so much as it is learning about the conversations, about seeing publication as an ongoing process," but I want to amend that statement slightly. I'm now beginning to wonder if even the metaphor of "conversations" pushes us too quickly towards the "publication" end of things.

As I mentioned early on, over at Rhetwork, the idea of collection has been gathering steam for me for a while. And so I want to contrast collection with conversation as a guiding metaphor for academic/intellectual activity, particularly at its early stages, i.e., in graduate school.

I'll add some citations to this eventually, but this summer, at RSA, I gave a paper where I suggested that collection, as Walter Benjamin describes it in "Unpacking My Library," operates as a hinge between narrative and database, in part based upon our affective investment in it. I may look at my big wall of books and see all the various connections among texts, in terms of their content, chronology, and my own encounters with them. In short, I may perceive it as a big wall of conversations, of disciplinary narratives. Someone else may happen upon it, and simply see a library, a database of rhetoric, critical theory, technology studies, et al.

The value of the collection, of having all these books here, is that I'll never know what's going to be useful. I can't predict, when I begin an essay, what will find its way in and what won't. I have the luxury of being able to work my way through my collection, following up on dimly perceived connections, my own added marginalia, etc. And the wall enacts on a material scale what's going on in my head as I constantly add articles, books, ideas, etc., to the collection of disciplinary knowledge that occupies a certain portion of my mind.

It probably feels like I've wandered from my point. My point is that we tend to think of our disciplines largely in terms of the narratives we construct, stories of the field's progress from point A to B to C or as conversations among certain luminaries occurring in the pages of journals and books. To treat the discipline as a database (where, a la Manovich, it's just "an infinite flat surface where individual texts are placed in no particular order� ) is to foreclose, initially at least, on the narratives that we tell ourselves about our fields.

But of course, disciplines are neither one nor the other; they're both. From the outside, the publications in a given discipline comprise a growing mountain of discourse that no one person could possibly master. From the inside, even a single article may yield all sorts of narrative information about where the writer's from, with whom she studied, to whom she's responding. We become quite adept at reconstructing conversations from a single voice, and the occluded genres of footnotes, citations, and bibliographies can only help us do so.

And when faced with the conceptual metaphor of a discipline as a gathering of conversations, as a parlor, our response is to want to join it, to enter the conversation. The uber-competitive job market only fuels this desire, as if it needed feeding. When faced with a conversation, there aren't a lot of other options.

I want instead to think about collection as an alternative metaphor for what we do, or an earlier stage of a longer process. In part, I'm prompted by Brendan's Katamari Interface and by Jeff's comments about DJs as researchers. When I think of the tools that I use most often, I can see them in terms of collecting:

  • blogs, collecting my thoughts and notes
  • del.icio.us, collecting my bookmarks
  • Library Thing, collecting my books
  • Bloglines, collecting my feeds

and so on. In talking about why it's important to "read it all," Paul explains:

I then scan through [the library] to explore the intertextuality--which sources get mentioned more frequently and how. I then collect more sources if I don't have them handy. Without this process, it wouldn't be possible to come up with viable research questions or to know what questions or concerns reviewers and readers might have.

This is exactly the kind of data mining that we become proficient at as academics, but it's awfully tough to accomplish unless you have that collection to begin with. As we gain experience, we learn how to read articles for their intertextuality, for the differences between primary and secondary sources, etc. But the conversations emerge from collection, not the other way around. And in fact, I want to suggest that the discipline as database also emerges from collection, but that's a different essay.

I'm most certainly not trying to sneak around the back way to saying that "grad students these days are too focused on publication blah blah blah," although there are probably hints of that here. To take a course is to engage in collection, as you read texts and add them either to your active memory or your shelves. It's something we all do, period. To read a journal is to add to your collection.

I'm doing a guest shot in our gateway course this week, and what I'll be talking about, what I'm interested in here, are the logics of thinking as a collector. There are all sorts of tools, not to mention plenty of great examples, for the process of managing your collection, but it's important, I think, to make the figural leap. That is, it's important to understand that what we do in graduate school is to collect.

When I was a kid, I collected baseball cards. And for the first couple of months, I would buy the random packs of cards, always with the assurance that there'd be at least a few cards that I didn't have. As that number began to shrink, I'd start trading my doubles for friends' doubles, of ones that I hadn't gotten yet. And it would get to the point where I'd need only a few to complete a team or even a season, and so I'd go and pay premium prices at the card shop for the one or three that I needed. As a collector, it was important to have the whole set, of course. Reading the journals in a field is a lot like buying store packs, and I don't mean that as an insult. But their output is constrained by their input. Some journals are like being able to buy a store pack with the guarantee that the cards are all from the same team. That's also what taking graduate courses are like, I think. At some point, though, you have to get really specific, and spend your time strategically, to find the key elements missing from your collection, and that means going beyond course work or journals, and tracing bibliographies, asking experts, etc. It means thinking like a collector.

On the one hand, thinking like a collector means just accumulating, rolling your brain/katamari over everything and anything it can pick up. But it also means thinking about how you're going to manage it, how you're going to be able to use, in two years, what you're reading now. I can tell you from experience, "Well of course I'll just remember it" won't work. Seriously. It was just about a year ago that I was coming off of a discussion of note-taking (I taught our gateway course last year), and wrote:

One of the things that I emphasized in class today was the need to develop systems that are sustainable, things you can do (and keep doing) after the initial motivation has passed and the glow has faded.

And that's what I'll end with this year. And probably this week in that course. Use folders, notebooks, blogs, whatever, but build sustainable collection practices that you can engage in tomorrow as well as two years from now. Collect, collect, collect.

Told you it'd be long. That's all.

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September 2, 2006

Don't I have better things to do?

blogseal

September 1, 2006

Jorge Cham coming to SU

Local fans of Jorge Cham's PhD Comics should be aware that he's coming to campus next week (Wednesday at 4 in the Maxwell Auditorium). Unfortunately, I've got myself scheduled for something right smack during his talk, and it's not something that I can sneak out of in order to get a color print of the above signed, much as I might like to.

Instead, I'll just continue to settle for the b/w copy I've got right below my nametag (on my office door), and the certainty that there has never been a more accurate portrayal of the core truth of my life as an academic.

That is all. Later on this month, Art Spiegelman is speaking, and I'll try to catch/blog that...