The best of Works Cited

Most widely read

• Okay, all of the below is outdated. My most widely read Works Cited post is "Humanities scholarship is incredibly relevant and that makes people sad" (4 January 2014).
• My most widely read Works Cited post is "Children dressed as animals dressed as children (or, The Meaning of Christmas)," 20 December 2011, on the way that cuteness is pitted against Yuletide sinthomosexual figures like Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch. Apparently people like a little queer theory around the holiday season. (I do.)
  [Actually, as of May 2012 the "most widely read" spot was usurped by "Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu," which was linked at ProfHacker, zunguzungu, and a few other places, more because it was particularly au courant than because it was smart. It has the most hits, but I'm loath to accord it higher status than the post on dressing children up as animals.// Update 11/2012: Both have been superseded by this.]
• The above is closely followed by It's not "the job market"; it's the profession (and it's your problem too), 25 September 2011.
• If the above posts were timely, The Visible Hand, 3 May 2011, has been more enduring. I was flattered to see this post included in Paul Fyfe's Intro to Digital Humanities syllabus and in Stewart Varner's syllabus for the graduate seminar "Topics and Tools in Digital Humanities."
• My most widely read post ever was not written at Works Cited but at Arcade: How Public Like a Frog: On Academic Blogging, 20 March 2011.
• My series on giving and receiving feedback on writing is here.

I plan to write my next book on a concept called puerility. Puerility is experimentalism's playful and destructive younger brother, an anti-epistemological mode with a strong family resemblance to experimentalism's deep investment in epistemology. The project obviously builds on my current book, but pursues my more recent interest in minorness and the history of childhood. I've been writing occasional posts on puerility for about two years.

• 11 November 2012, Un coup de dès jamais n'abolira le hasard
• 2 November 2012, The Passion of Nate Silver (Sort Of)
• June 2012, An A B C of Puerility: Anderson, Britten, Crane, guest-posted on Aaron Bady's blog at The New Inquiry. The TNI version is a lightly revised aggregation of three posts here: Commendable, "I'm a raven," and A Surplus of Toys.
• 14 March 2011, The Case of @MayorEmanuel; or, The Puerility of Profanity
• 19 December 2010, A Supposedly Fun Thing: Text-Mining and the Amusement/Knowledge System; or, the Epistemological Sentimentalists
• 27 September 2010, Puerility and corporate authorship; or, Being a real boy (on Jerome Christensen on Pixar and Disney)
• 2 September 2010, Puerile Desire and the Cuteness of "WHHHY?" (on Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You")
• I'm intrigued to notice that I've had boyhood and puerility at the back of my mind at least since 2007.

Here are some posts about theory and digital humanities, some of which were Editors' Choices at Digital Humanities Now in November 2011:

• 19 October 2011, When DH Was In Vogue; or, THATCamp Theory
• 3 November 2011, American Nerds Go to THATCamp
• 19 October 2011, Translation, Communication, Code (a Storified Twitter conversation featuring Tom Scheinfeldt, Patrick Murray-John, and an all-star ensemble)

And here are a few more:

• 26 April 2013, Goldmines, on cultural preservation, uncompensated labor, and doing things out of love
• 26 June 2011, Such a Doll (on Teen Talk Barbie)
• 14 May 2011, Telephone; or, Some thoughts on publicness: Being a public school means being in public, circulating promiscuously.
• 14 May 2011, Gamification (or the Romance of Accumulation): Questions I seriously have about Thoreau and Equiano.
• 8 April 2011, I'll dig with it?: Some people are still puzzled by policy questions that mainstream feminists definitively solved in the 1970s, and that's ridiculous.
• 19 February 2011, The timbre of sincerity, on Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."
• 17 February 2011, Quiz: a quiz I really gave my students.
• 17 December 2010, Google Books N-grams and the Number of Words for Snow: frequency is not significance, and significance is not importance.
• 3 December 2010, Google's Automatic Writing and the Gendering of Birds: Google's nonrepresentativeness is part of what gives it the sense of tapping into an always already corporate Zeitgeist.
• 24 June 2010, Attention and Length, on the internets.
• 28 May 2010, How to respond to others' writing: a little-studied and much needed art.
• 25 April 2010, Tell Me True, on the best bus ad of all time.
• 16 April 2010, Against the "excused absence"—some course policy blogging; whee!
• 21 September 2008, The Necessary Spinster, on spinsters and telecommunications in Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire.
  
• 17 December 2007, An Open Letter to Sherman Alexie, on why The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is head-hurtingly sexist and has probably already traumatized a generation of girls.


• 1 November 2007, La Beauté et la bête, on the conditions of love in Disney's Beauty and the Beast.