Un coup de dès jamais n'abolira le hasard

About a week ago I wrote a post adding to my ongoing series on puerility, observing how the cultural phenomenon of the FiveThirtyEight blog and the conflicts surrounding it exemplified a discourse in which discrete, mutually exclusive outcomes are the only imaginable ones. Then, while I drove to Maryland for a workshop, stopping in Philadelphia on the way back, about eighty people commented on my post to let me know that they were persuaded (in error) that I was somehow defaming Nate Silver personally and statistics as a field, and that it was up to them to defend both.

This seems to me to suggest two things.

First, that the same logic that gives us "Obama or Romney?" as the paramount question one can ask about an election also gives us "for or against?" as the paramount question one could ask about the FiveThirtyEight blog. This is in no way an interesting question to me, but for many people it was the only question, and therefore my post could only be read as answering it. This reduction to discrete, mutually exclusive, and usually binary outcomes legible in the terms of a game is of course what I was identifying as a form of puerility in the first place. Obama or Romney? Statistics or "gut"? Nate Silver or Politico? Quants or scouts? These questions clearly generate a great deal of pleasure, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which they are debated, but there are other questions, involving words like "why" and "how," that are worth discussing.

Second, that childhood is so overwhelmingly treated as a debased category that to invoke it is considered an insult.* In addition to its literal meaning of "boyish" (Latin puer), "puerile," in common usage, carries a pejorative connotation, of course, but that's its least descriptive and least useful aspect, which is why I set it aside. Puerility, in the sense of the performance of child masculinity, is one of the most powerful political forces in the present moment; that's why there is a "Nate Silver phenomenon" in the first place. It should go without saying that anyone can engage in this performance, but it is also worth noting (so I noted it) that Silver's public persona (white, male, youthful, virtuosic) makes him a particularly good candidate, out of the many people and organizations aggregating polls, to emerge as the celebrity of popular political statistics.

On election night it was interesting (though not surprising) to observe how, once the presidential race was called, Silver began to be celebrated on Twitter (elsewhere too, I'm sure, but Twitter is time-stamped) as if he were the magical wizard that, prior to the election, Silver himself so patiently tried to explain that he was not. A lot of the tweets were really funny (funniest), but many of them oddly called the Obama victory "a win for statistics" or even "a win for reality," as if to suggest that the validity of either were contingent on who won the election.** Some even explicitly trod into "Nate Silver IS a wizard!" territory:

Drunk Nate Silver held a seance for Nostradamus just so he could mock his abilities. #DrunkNateSilver (@fivethirtyeight)

— If It's A Choice... (@IfItsAChoice) November 8, 2012

Such celebrations seemed to concede (erroneously) that Scarborough et al. had a point in the first place— that a Romney win would have falsified Silver's model, and that Silver's model were based on occult wizardry rather than weighted averages of widely available polling data. As Siva Vaidhyanathan put it:

You realize, of course, that if Romney had won Nate Silver's prediction would still have been right.

— Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) November 9, 2012

And surely many of the people declaring Silver the real winner of the election knew this, and had even, prior to the election, said it. This put no damper on the explosion of Silver jokes, however; the pleasure of play trumped the basic premises of the very thing being celebrated. The cultural meaning of statistics was precisely puerile at this moment, openly signifying "winning team" more than it signified the actual principles of statistics.

Another form of data analysis was also declared a winner after the election, it is worth noting—the data-mining that enabled the Obama camp's microtargeted get-out-the-vote effort. This was swept into the same category as Silver's poll averages and made a cause for celebration. But as Zeynep Tufekçi, who had earlier argued that work like Silver's had the potential to limit the puerile logic of the horse race, observed, data-mining is ethically neutral at best, and is as eagerly pursued by Target as by the Democratic Party:

Winning by big data driven ground game & micro-messaging is appealing (not saying all that it was) but it's policy neutral. Who next time?

— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 7, 2012

Or as Alexis Madrigal put it, "Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats". "The left's celebrating the analytical method right now as if it belonged to them," Madrigal writes. "But it doesn't. [...T]his election was not a triumph of data over no data, of rigor over hunch. The 2012 election was a triumph of Democratic data over Republican data." What Madrigal predicts next is a data analysis war, as Republicans struggle to catch up with and exceed the facility already achieved by Democrats.

This is indeed probably what will happen in 2016, and it is about winning. In such a discursive environment, we can easily have another election in which drone strikes are not up for debate at all. But who wins—the question that FiveThirtyEight and the political parties' data-mining efforts each, in their different ways, attempt to answer***—only ultimately matters in the context of policy questions. Are we able to ask them?

-----

*This is complicated, to say the least.

**This is in contrast with the predictions in individual states, which, taken together, are rather more meaningful for evaluating the model.

***I.e., Silver tries to answer by prediction based on polling data, while the data-miners try to answer by trying to secure a particular outcome.

Twit twit twit

In Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit identifies the animal cry as the limit point beyond speech:

The animal cry signals the moment of contact between those two ontic worlds: the cry is, as Derrida explains, a signal burdened with the antidiscursive force of animality and madness. Burke's 1757 reflection on the sublime includes a section on "The Cries of Animals." For Burke, the experience of the sublime aroused by the animal's cry imposes a moment wholly outside time—an extemporaneous moment—in which the dynamics of reason are temporarily halted. (43)

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

Yet a long philosophical tradition (including Kant) also locates in the animal cry the source of human speech, insofar as speech is imagined as originating in the mimicry of animal sounds (Lippit 41).

So there is something coy about the way that Twitter names itself after animal sounds,
as if to suggest that there is something fundamentally antilinguistic about social media text. "Don't mind us," it seems to say; "we're just twittering, like animals. No language to see here."

I think that in some cases this makes people feel as though they have to live up to a kind of antilinguistic standard on Twitter, to introduce noise gratuitously as if in homage to the medium—as if to make it really tweeting. That's the only explanation I can think of for tweets like this one from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa; @ChuckGrassley), whom I imagine writes like this only on Twitter:



In contrast with common abbreviations and slang, which are underwritten by identifiable (if diverse) logics, here the abbreviations and nonstandardisms seem random, even perverse. For example, "evr." does not save any characters; a period would seem better spent at the end of the first, unstopped sentence. As for the wasted space before the question mark or the capitalized "Learn"—what can these be but antilinguistic performances? (I was interested to learn, incidentally, that Sen. Grassley shares my hatred of the "History" Channel.)

T. S. Eliot, from The Waste Land, 1922

The fact that the animal in question with Twitter is the bird adds another dimension to consider. Bird-talk is gendered feminine, from the speechless Philomel ("twit twit twit"—she is turned into a bird to enforce her speechlessness, when cutting out her tongue is not enough) to the cheeping and twittering of the town women in The Music Man:



It's no wonder Twitter is seen as a site of gossip and rumor, intellectual triviality and linguistic disaster. It intentionally casts itself as mere animal noises, or, what evidently amounts to the same thing, female speech. And as I've suggested elsewhere, the radical multiplicity of voices on Twitter likewise suggests a flock indiscriminately cheeping.

This is undoubtedly the source of the fears that are occasionally raised that social media are making us lose our grip on language, as if that were a thing that could be so easily lost. (Try writing like Gertrude Stein. It's not easy.) To lose language might just be to lose our humanity, and then where would we be?

Well, the posthuman turn is so five years ago that it's difficult to get exercised about such a question. The interesting implications do not lie in fears of loss, for we are all already cyborgs or animals.

But good old Twitter—it makes us both at once.

--



Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.

When the birds attack Bodega Bay in Hitchcock's film (1963), a terrified mother lashes out at the film's avatar of liberated (and threateningly undomesticated) femininity, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren): "I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil!" One reading of The Birds would take the birds as a furious feminine multiplicity, attacking domesticity and the family as if in revenge.

Such blogging fail. I am now just posting Twitter conversations wholesale. But hey, Storify's interface is a lot better than it used to be!

The conversation below is based on Patrick Murray-John's post "Theory, DH, and Noticing," which enlarges on ideas in this comment.

Rough draft

It strikes me that Tuesday's post is actually just an expansion of a series of tweets and retweets. This blog is called Works Cited, so in the interests of citation, here is, as it were, the rough draft:



Semirelatedly, apparently Google has just renamed its search group the "knowledge" group.

This is completely hilarious.

I'll dig with it?

I already mentioned it on Twitter, but I'd just like to make another plug for Bethany Nowviskie's great post on data mining and gender, "What Do Girls Dig?"

I was actually slightly shocked to see the estimable Brett Bobley tweet that the organizers of Digging into Data had noticed the gender imbalance (of two women out of a total of thirty-three speakers!) and were scratching their heads over it.

Really? Not that keeping track of these things is Brett's full-time job, but didn't we just have this conversation about the VIDA stats? Aren't there standard, time-tested answers to these questions of which all people who care about equity are aware? Maybe I'm projecting, but I felt as though the many responses Brett received on Twitter included a strong subtext of "duh"--and rightly.

Tanya Clement's comment that highly educated, capable women often play important but disempowered roles in DH projects is spot on; as Brett writes, "The speakers are the project PIs." No kidding! As Katha Pollitt recently wrote in response to the VIDA stats (you know, that conversation we just had), "Women are often managing editors, a position with lots of work and not much power."

There are a lot of factors that contribute to these circumstances, as Bethany notes:

I'm sure that gender imbalance in this area has little to do with the "Digging into Data" process and more with broader issues, going all the way back (yes, that chestnut) to STEM education for girls in the public schools -- but mostly, I suspect, it is about the number of female academics both qualified and inclined to do this work, and who find themselves both at a stage of their careers and possessed of adequate collaborative networks to support their applications for such grants.

But to me, her most interesting observation was about the gendered language with which data-mining itself is often presented.

Although it wasn't really what I was going for, I respect my pals' advocacy, highlighted above, for funders' launching of an aggressive campaign to identify and mentor more women applicants for the "Digging into Data" program. And clearly there's institutional work to be done on the level of our schools, colleges, and universities. But personally, I feel less strongly about both of those things than I do about the need for the whole DH community to be as thoughtful as possible about the way we describe this kind of work -- the language we use.

I've heard three kinds of responses from female colleagues and students about the "Digging into Data Challenge." One (the rarest) is simple enthusiasm -- though it's interesting that presumably few women applied and none of their projects were compelling enough to fund. Another is trepidation: "Is this too hard-core? Involving too much math or statistical analysis I never learned? Do I understand the scholarly possibilities and have the support network I'd need?" In other words: this is a challenge. Am I competitive? (in every sense of that word).

As Micah Vandegrift commented on the post, "mining" is very much a gendered occupation! Add in the fact that the "digging into data challenge" sounds like some kind of extreme sport and you have a very odd rhetoric for scholarship.

The title of this post is of course a reference to Seamus Heaney's ode to masculine labor, "Digging." (Yes, I was forced to study this poem in high school. Mr. Lilley, you were cool, but no love for this one.)

The poem's speaker contemplates the pen that "rests[] snug as a gun" in his hand, contrasting it with the spades that his father and grandfather wielded in their work. There's a moment of anxiety as the speaker realizes, "I’ve no spade to follow men like them," before remembering that he has his pen. "I'll dig with it."

If you think you can hear Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gently inquiring, "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?," Heaney pretty much hits you over the head with the answer, and, spoiler, it is "yes." The PIs (the speakers, the authors, the creators...) were all male? You don't say.

"By God, the old man could handle a spade./ Just like his old man." Seriously.

I'm on the fence about issuing the standard disclaimer about the good intentions and real efforts of Brett and the NEH to make equity a priority. This is a sort of cop-out solution, with my mini-sort-of-disclaimer here. Of course they are well intentioned and they do make real efforts. The NEH has done a lot to support digital humanities, and I'm thinking of them as the government prepares to shut down. This is not in any sense a personal criticism. But, institutionally speaking, two women speakers out of thirty-three is manifestly absurd, and having no notion about how to address it is also seriously odd. I find it disheartening that these disclaimers are still obligatory, because this is 2011, and we are long past the point where having good intentions but not good results yet is okay.

The criticism of enthusiasm

[Update | Greetings, visitors from Eyresses. Thanks for clicking through; I hope you'll read what I've actually written. I'd love it if you also clicked through to Roland Greene's post, to which this is a response.]

* * * * *

This is a response to Roland Greene's post "The Social Role of the Critic," cross-posted from the comment thread at Arcade.

* * * * *

Roland writes:

The fact that so many blogs are produced by enthusiasts is a symptom; critics are not enthusiasts.

This is perhaps the central point that fan studies would contest. One can have reservations about fan studies, but I think there's something to be said for the notion that there can be a meaningfully critical criticism of enthusiasm, what Catharine Stimpson long ago called "reading for love." I've heard Roland argue elsewhere that perhaps close reading ought to be rethought vis-à-vis other modes of critical reading, like translation. I could imagine this argument compassing creative responses of greater or lesser craft as well, as scholars like Julie Levin Russo have suggested, most recently at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference a few weeks ago.*

It is probably not an accident that so much of the critical fan culture that inspires so much scorn is driven by women (think Eyresses or Gaga Stigmata). Feminine reading is by definition uncritical reading, as we see in that scene in Nana (1880) in which Nana, mass culture in the flesh, reads a naturalist novel about a character very much like herself and doesn't "get it." But as theorists of children's literature have pointed out, sometimes enthusiasm is only made possible by a radical imaginative rereading--or rewriting--of the text that does indeed tell us something about literature that's different from what literature tells us about itself. To return to Nana, for example, to be a reader gendered "feminine" is to constantly love literature only insofar as one can critically reread or, indeed, rewrite the elements that figure you, the reader, as, oxymoronically, a non-reader, one who is incapable of reading critically or of "getting it."

The question that Arcade itself, with its three rubrics of "Conversations," "Transactions," and "Publications," raises is what an e-journal is besides a blog, and what a blog is besides an e-journal. Is the front page of Arcade simply a continuum from the raw to the cooked? Do these rubrics differ in degree or in kind?

As my colleague Monica Soare has posed the question, what besides gender and class is the difference between the gendered and classed terms of "enthusiasm" and "connoiseurship"?

*Naturally I heard of this through the high-pitched, fluttering, terrifyingly feminine interface with mass culture known as Twitter, where a bad music video performed by a thirteen-year-old girl has been trending for a week, above several quite major news events, largely on the strength of an outpouring of scorn that was, oddly, directed specifically at the female child in question, rather than at any of the many adults actually responsible for the video.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983. Print.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March." New Literary History 21.4 (Autumn 1990) 957-976. JSTOR. Web. 21 March 2011.

The Case of @MayorEmanuel; or, The Puerility of Profanity

A wise friend of mine once explained the rule to me: adults can swear, and children can swear, but they can't swear in front of each other. It violates a boundary.

I suspect that this is, in part, because it is nowhere more necessary for adults to appear to be adults than around children. When the altogether hilarious lyric video for Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You" came out, I argued that the song was a virtuoso performance of puerility (that is, a particular kind of child-masculinity), and that the refrain "Fuck you!" was funny because it was so immature. I didn't, however, argue that liberal profanity was itself inherently puerile. But I now think it is, and the reason is @MayorEmanuel.

@MayorEmanuel is of course the brilliant fake Rahm Emanuel Twitter account authored by Dan Sinker and maintained over the course of the real Emanuel's mayoral campaign. Fake Rahm, accompanied by a Honda-driving David Axelrod (and his strangely agential moustache), innocent geeky wunderkind Carl the Intern (he fetches coffee, builds an igloo, calculates Rahm's correct position in an alternate dimension), stray puppy Hambone, and a politically savvy duck named Quaxelrod, curses his way through a mayoral campaign, Chicago winter weather, the Superbowl, and a number of hilarious visions involving the most recent Mayor Daley and, at one point, the disembodied (yet dapper!) head of Marshall Field. (I believe Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic did the definitive rundown.)

Really, the source of this insight isn't directly @MayorEmanuel but one of Kevin Dettmar's recent posts on the relationship between tiny bursts of writing (Twitter), medium chunks (blogging), and longer formats (articles, books). I left a comment that reminded me of one of Kevin's earlier posts, which in turn reminded me of my own series of posts on puerility, which by the way reminded me that, intentionally or otherwise, I end up posting serially, if intermittently, on the same topics, and one of those is puerility, and quite honestly I'll be surprised if it doesn't develop into a monograph eventually,* which perhaps speaks to Kevin's actual point.

But forget Kevin's actual point: back to the puerility of f-bombs.

The basic joke of the @MayorEmanuel account is that Rahm Emanuel is extremely foul-mouthed. So, stupid joke? Well, maybe at first. Sinker himself notes he got bored with just tweeting f-bombs. But of course the style had to persist as he began to add story arcs, and what it brings out is the puerile emotional intensity that must accompany a constant stream of profanity. Profanity constitutes a libidinal outburst; it's an intensifier with a particular affective charge. Constant, repeated outbursts of aggression, applied equally to things loved and things hated, can only be sustained by a puerile character.

Hated:

4 October 2010

Loved:

7 February 2011

Note the matching f-bombs.

Despite the fact that the real Rahm Emanuel is married, @MayorEmanuel's universe is a sort of boy-paradise, a Huck's raft variously located in Axelrod's old beater of a Civic, the crawlspace of Rahm's Chicago house, an igloo, and, at one point (as if in homage to Twain), an ice floe in the middle of the Chicago River. Female characters occasionally join in the play--Axelrod loses a pool cannonball competition to a seven-year-old girl named Alyssa, and Penny Pritzker and Helen Mirren, among others, make appearances--but the core quintet is all male. Yes, even the duck.

And while "fuck" is undoubtedly the most-used word in the whole feed, the five don't at all appear to be in a genital phase; all the actual libidinal impulses expressed involve food, coffee, and games (football, snow angels on a frozen Lake Michigan). And, of course (tellingly) shitting, one of fake Rahm's favorite pranks (Hambone, the puppy, is good at it too). Rahm even occasionally longs for a nap, requiring parenting:

22 February 2011

15 February 2011

He sometimes doesn't understand why various advisors won't "let" him do various puerile things. The most common of these is filling his campaign slogans and speeches with f-bombs, of course, but sometimes his prohibited desires are even more obviously childish:

Both 18 February 2011

The fact that the animal companions, Hambone and Quaxelrod (so named because of the moustachelike dark spot on his beak), are given human attributes while retaining some animal characteristics places @MayorEmanuel squarely in the tradition of children's fiction. Indeed, it's never clear how much of fake Rahm's world is his fantasy, and to what degree the puppy and the duck are anthropomorphized by Rahm's childish projection.

14 February 2011

22 February 2011

Indeed, @MayorEmanuel's primary influence may be Calvin and Hobbes, with Rahm playing Calvin and his friends variously playing parents and the toy/animal Hobbes. Fake Rahm's aggression is indistinguishable from puerile desire and enthusiasm--indeed, from play. And that's why fake Rahm's main character trait, his propensity to infuse every utterance with cursing, opens up vistas of delight and childish wonder:

17 February 2011

17 February 2011

18 February 2011

Fake Rahm's enthusiasm is, let's face it, cute.

Here's what Kevin Dettmar wrote about "Fuck You" back in August. It reveals a basic assumption that reappears in his comment regarding @MayorEmanuel, namely that f-bombs are a cheap form of humor, a kind of automatic or unearned transgression (in the way that sentimental fiction is supposed to deliver unearned feeling, for instance).

Friday’s Twitter stream was all abuzz with big love for the new Cee-Lo single, “Fuck You” (or, as YouTube’s dainty orthography/typography would have it, “F**k You”). One of my Tweeps and Producer Extraordinaire, Andy Zax (@andyzax), said it was “destined to be the anthem of late summer, 2010.” Normally I’m healthily skeptical of such claims: but Andy’s nobody’s fool. Not long after, my FB friend Carter Delloro updated his status, and it was clear he is equally smitten.

Something about this all annoyed me deeply. Maybe it’s my inner Church Lady: After all, what kind of a title is that for a song? How you gonna sell it at Wal-Mart? (Probably the way R.E.M. sold Automatic for the People, changing a certain song’s title to “Star Me Kitten.” “Star You”?) Also, I hate being scooped. I may not know much about music, but I know a bangin’ pop song when I hear one. I’ll be the judge, Andy and Carter: even better, I’ll be the critic, and weigh in, explaining how you’re wrong.

So I decided--sound unheard--that I’d write a smackdown of “Fuck You.” I mean clearly, Andy and Carter had been swayed by the naughty factor: I’m willing to drop the F-bomb when it gets some genuine communicative work done, but I was sure Cee-Lo was just being a Bad Boy.

"Just being a Bad Boy"--why, yes. I'm only using Kevin's post as an example, of course, and partly by way of citation, since it's what got me thinking about the puerility of profanity in the first place. But it's a fairly common characterization of the use of f-bombs in humor, and is instructively dismissive to boot.

So is profanity inherently funny, or "just" (to borrow Kevin's word) immature? Well, the examples of Cee Lo's "Fuck You" and Sinker's @MayorEmanuel suggest that it's funny because it's immature; it's a form of self-infantilization, and thus a form of self-deprecation.

The dissonance that produces humor, in @MayorEmanuel, is the disconnect between Rahm's childishness and the (supposedly) grown-up business of a mayoral campaign (children, after all, cannot vote). Profanity is actually the hilarious hinge between these two: as my wise friend explained, it violates a boundary--because typically profanity is a boundary between adult and child realms. In @MayorEmanuel, profanity is a metonym for all the libidinal puerility that really is present in "grown-up" political campaigns, and in particular, in Rahm Emanuel's famously hard-nosed political style. Ha ha, Rahm Emanuel curses a lot. It's only superficially funny, until it reveals the puerility within a certain masculinist (and "realistic") political style--and then it's profoundly fucking hilarious.

*Not just by gluing some blog posts together, for God's sake. It's called revision.

This post's title is with apologies to Jacqueline Rose.

My favorite character is definitely Quaxelrod.

#englishmajor

The most terrifying, fascinating hashtag ever?

Moacir's #JamesFrancoFacts are funny in general, but the one about getting Blackboard to work properly has to be the most hyperbolic, and therefore the funniest.

I should add that, reaffirming that it's not facts but questions that are really important, Ladysquires's James Franco questions are equally funny, and insightful to boot.

Facebook is ridiculous

I was well into my old age (like, 21?) when Facebook appeared, so I never created a Facebook account until earlier this year. I was lured in by the walled garden effect; the Franklin Humanities Institute would post event details on Facebook, and you could only see them if you had an account, so I created one. Then my adorable young cousin friended me and I was sunk, i.e. Facebookified. (I still love you, FHI. You too, Brookie!)

While I've come to be a big fan of Twitter and, of course, blogs, I've never found a reason to relinquish my suspicion of Facebook. Even before the privacy controversies, it always seemed to me that Facebook only gave the illusion of privacy, leaving you with limited control of your identity and none of the advantages of total openness that you get with blogs and Twitter (which is of course simply microblogging).

I also find the "friend" relation on Facebook, frankly, creepy. Facebook requires that this relation be symmetrical; it actively tries to dissolve the distinctions between acquaintances, colleagues, family, and friends. This contrasts with Twitter and RSS feeds (and Zotero), in which you control whom you follow but not who follows you.

Asymmetrical relationships encourage professional connections; I follow my friends and they often follow me back, but I also follow some scholars who have no idea who I am (and that's fine). Some people follow me and I have no idea who they are; that's fine too, because we're not "friends." Twitter is largely for sharing links, so people who subscribe to my Twitter feed generally do so because they want the kinds of things I find interesting to come across their radar. It is, in other words, an intellectual relation. A Twitter connection is primarily formal, not emotional, and that's a good thing.

What a difference between Twitter's asymmetrical "following" and the ways Facebook tries to guilt you into being "friends" with everybody you've ever known or could plausibly know. The classic example is being Facebook "friends" with your parents--always an awkward thing, even if you get along well with your parents, because after all, a parent is something other than and beyond a friend. A whole bunch of French Canadian Cécires, charming people but of no known relation to me, have tried to friend me on Facebook. Of course! That's how Facebook works; that's how "friending" works. Nobody would ever follow my Twitter feed on the basis of a surname. On the basis of tweet contents (limerick, a mention of Marianne Moore, the use of a conference hashtag), yes. A possible genealogical connection, no.

I never posted much of anything on Facebook (I think I made two status updates: one to post a CFP and one to say that I was deactivating my account). I deactivated my account a few weeks ago, which isn't the same as deleting the account. I think my short and apathetic tenure on Facebook has me fairly safe, although of course I could be kidding myself (Byzantine instructions for actually deleting an account are linked below).

Typical of its penchant for confusing the personal with business, Facebook attempts some pretty funny emotional manipulation when you deactivate an account. Below, I'm told that a friend from college; my best friend from second grade, now an actor in L.A.; a good local friend; my sister-in-law; and my youngest brother are going to miss me. They won't be able to keep in touch with me.



It could be just me, but it strikes me that if the only thing keeping me in touch with someone is Facebook, then that person is not going to miss me, and I'm not going to miss them either. I think my friends and family and I are going to manage.

Some recent Facebook-related links:

• Ryan Singel at wired.com: "Facebook's Gone Rogue" (via Julia)


• The always insightful danah boyd: "Facebook and Radical Transparency," and her follow-up "Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated"


• Aaron's smart post on the privilege of demanding that others be unveiled: "The Soul of Mark Zuckerberg"


• Melissa at Geek Feminism Blog: "Facebook is a Feminist Issue"


• Tracy Clark-Flory: "Facebook predicts your relationship is over" (not informative so much as hilarious)


• How to permanently delete your Facebook account

The Search for the Codex Cardona

It seems that if I get a book for free, I feel that I must read it, even if, generally speaking, it is low on the list of priorities.

I got this book from Duke UP in a Twitter contest of sorts (yes, that's right), and so I read it. I don't have time for a full review, and I'm not the right person to write one, in any case. Bauer, a professor at UC Davis, describes a sixteenth-century Mexican painted book of dubious provenance and his attempts to track it down. As the sensational title suggests, although it's a true account of something basically nerdy, it's framed as a mystery-adventure. I kept wanting the book to be either more academic or more committed to its own paranoia (in my mind there is a difference); the book made repeated stylistic nods to Umberto Eco but not, I felt, terribly successfully. I think I would have been more surprised by the cloak-and-dagger business if I hadn't been made to expect Foucault's Pendulum. I found the generic hybrid interesting, and the actual codex sounds fascinating, but I think in the end I'd have preferred to read an academic article on it. The plates from the codex at the back of the book were perhaps the best part.

Arnold J. Bauer, The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

A Brief and True Report on the New Found Use of Twitter in the Classroom

The Chronicle claims that teaching with Twitter is "not for the faint of heart," a "daredevil" sort of thing to do.

Daredevil -- you know, brave, foolhardy, and done as a stunt.

Brave, apparently, because letting students communicate with you via what is seen as their natural medium, Web 2.0 (a misconception, by the way) might make you lose power. (??)

Foolhardy, because you can't control what the students say.

A stunt, because Twitter is on the web, therefore by definition vapid, ephemeral, a mere fad.

Oh, Chronicle of Higher Ed. Always bringing the laughs, always enjoying that so-called iced cream.

It was, I admit, with trepidation that I assigned Twitter as part of my new research course. It wasn't just a variation on the age-old Sakai forum, like the blog. It was really a new thing. But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to do it.

-Twitter is a real thing in the world. Despite the name, which suggests unserious chick stuff (pun intended), people use it and communicate with it. Somebody is, or somebodies are, the official tweeter for the American Museum of Natural History, the Canadian press Coach House Books, the Exploratorium, and the Harry Ransom Center, just to name a few. People, one day your job could be tweeting.

-As a medium, Twitter is qualitatively different from blogs and Facebook. It is public like blogs but social like Facebook. (Or rather, Twitter and Facebook are both social, but Twitter is social differently from Facebook.) In a course that examines various media, Twitter makes an interesting case study.

-The threshold of participation is low. It is informal and brief, meaning students are empowered to participate. It thrives on concision and links.

-Hashtags model a dynamic, non-hierarchical mode of organization that is typical of the web and distinct from most library catalogues. Students should be educated in the use of both models.

-Like most Web 2.0 applications, Twitter is interstitial. You never focus your attention on it; it's just sort of there, a low hum. I'm not above making my course intrude on my students' daily lives.

-Its publicness promotes community. Students see one another's thoughts and may respond in an informal way. This is especially valuable in the context of research.

-Other instructors have used Twitter to good effect.

I'm only three weeks into the semester, during which time the students have been tweeting for a mere two weeks. But so far I'm pleased with how it's going. The students are responding to one another. They know how to use a hashtag. They tweet more than the required minimum (because, I suspect, it's useful).

I tend to see an upswing in tweets the night before class; my students seem to use it primarily to respond informally to the reading. Sometimes it's kvetching, which I think is on the whole a good thing; the reading is genuinely difficult, and a certain amount of online griping means that no one is ashamed to admit it. Sometimes it's specific questions or observations. Sometimes it's just "Whoa" -- also a valid response. A few times, people have asked me questions via Twitter (my RSS feed keeps me informed of such things).

It is, as I mentioned, early in the semester. I'll be interested to see how the use of Twitter continues, especially as the students begin work on their research projects.

Teaching: it's on! It seems like a good class so far. I'll likely have more to say about it soon; it's my first time teaching with Twitter and Zotero. I'm also, for the first time, allowing more leeway than usual with the blog (a total number of required posts rather than strictly biweekly posts). So it's consciously a fairly media-heavy course.

Various things are keeping me busy at the moment, in a happy way, but there's more to come, no doubt. This semester I'll be posting on my current research from time to time at the course blog. I try to reveal myself as a writer (and, for this class, as a researcher) whenever I'm teaching, as part of my campaign to demystify scholarship.