I'm rather proud that one of the top search terms leading to this blog is still "lofgeornost."

Best of

I finally bothered to put together a "Best of Works Cited" page. "Best" might be a misnomer, but there it is.

Not blogging as a way of blogging

Here is my advice to anyone who is thinking of firing off a peeved response to something someone else wrote about them on the internet:

Refrain and maintain.

Annoyingly, a systemwide Blogger glitch has caused yesterday's post on telephones to disappear, along with some queued material. If it doesn't reappear over the course of the day then I'll simply re-post.

[Which is to say: thanks to those who kindly linked to yesterday's post, and I'm sorry that that link is now broken. I hope it comes back.]

[As of 3pm: the link is back, but yesterday's comments have disappeared. Alas.]

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.

Many thanks to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic blogs for linking to my recent editor's post over on Arcade. All no doubt due to the Bady Bump, for which Aaron, too, is due thanks.

I hope the extra exposure leads more academics to consider finding ways to think in public.

[Update 5/23: Thanks, also, to BookForum.]

Also: I must admit to feeling a little smug about getting a Marianne Moore line into circulation outside its usual territory. The 1924 version of "Poetry" forever!!

How Public Like a Frog

Over at the Arcade Editors' Blog, I've just posted some more of my usual ramblings about academic blogging. I may enlarge on the issues raised in the final paragraph at a later date, since they relate to teaching and some particular problems I want to solve.

Housekeeping

I just spent ten minutes tidying up the links at right, adding a new section on digital publishing and archives. I think I may be missing a few things, but that's how it goes. I still can't bring myself to effect the inevitable migration to Wordpress, for some reason.

In other news, I'll be making a quick research trip to Duke next month to avail myself of their delightful women's history collections. Folks in the area, anything I should Absolutely Not Miss?

According to my sitemeter, while Mac OS X accounts for 10.9% of web use [dubious source], it constitutes 63.4% of traffic to this blog.

Imagining communities

I've been thinking lately about the similarities between a blog comment thread and a classroom discussion. It was an odd comparison for me, at first, because I've often used the blog for teaching, as a supplement to and (for the shy students) a replacement for discussion in class.

But I was thinking lately about comment policies, and good commenters, and bad commenters, and what makes a commenting community good. Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic often writes about the high quality of the comments his blog receives. A guest blogger, G.D., recently wrote:

The commenters here have a rep of being smart and thoughtful. Rare is the internet cohort with whom you can thoughtfully chop it up about the Civil War, pro quarterbacking, and the finer points of beer.

This is true.

The canonical inverse of the good commenting community is YouTube, where a thousand ignoramuses bloom. Here are some comments on a randomly chosen video (random to me; promoted on YouTube's front page):


These comments are insubstantial, unthoughtful, etc. (Surprisingly, for YouTube, they are grammatical, however.)

When there's a good commenting community, there's inevitably someone invested in creating that commenting community. There's usually a commenting policy and pretty vigilant moderation. Coates has this; YouTube does not.

I think comment moderation might be controversial for (1) people who haven't thought much about it and (2) trolls, who inevitably call this "censorship." To me it's completely clear that ground rules have to be set and enforced in a commenting community, and that that enforcement is what enables high-level discussions. In this sense, it's like a classroom discussion.*

But there's also one more reason that people resist the notion of comment moderation, or certain forms of comment moderation, and that's due to the ideology (I use the word advisedly) of the democratic web. The web is thought of as a leveller, a place of "freedom," where "information wants to be free" in both senses of the word, where anyone can go anywhere or say anything. "Walled gardens" like Facebook and publications with paywalls are regarded as an affront to this principle.

While the web does operate in ways that make openness advantageous (Twitter's openness, for instance, makes it a very focused social form, paradoxically), the many valences of "openness" and "freedom" are too often mistaken for one another. Since these concepts have very strong affective registers, people on the internet often seem ready to give their lives to defend another's right to troll. If there is one reasonable argument in support of the claim that the internet naturally tends toward shallow discussions, it lies herein. The ideology of openness in many cases encourages behaviors that prevent high-quality conversation.

For example, "openness" might dictate allowing commenters to ask basic questions about the topic under discussion. It's easy to see why. The ideology of openness would dictate that anyone operating in good faith should be allowed into the discussion, that no question is stupid, and that to demand a certain degree of familiarity with the topic up front smacks of elitism.

This attitude is pervasive among even the most thoughtful digital humanists, as evidenced in Dan Cohen's recent call for suggestions for a book title:

I’m crowdsourcing the title of my next book, which is about the way in which common web tech/methods should influence academia, rather than academia thinking it can impose its methods and genres on the web. The title should be a couplet like “The X and the Y” where X can be “Highbrow Humanities” “Elite Academia” “The Ivory Tower” “Deep/High Thought” [insert your idea] and Y can be “Lowbrow Web” “Common Web” “Vernacular Technology/Web” “Public Web” [insert your idea]. so possible titles are “The Highbrow Humanities and the Lowbrow Web” or “The Ivory Tower and the Wild Web” etc. What’s your choice? Thanks in advance for the help and suggestions.

Dan explicitly wants to leverage a distinction between an academia that is "highbrow," "elite," and closed (an "ivory tower") and a web that is by its very nature "lowbrow," "vernacular," and open ("wild"). Is that Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" I hear playing in the background?

It should be obvious that I think this is a false dichotomy and a false kind of openness, and a comparison to the classroom makes it obvious why this is so. In the classroom, we establish rules not to restrict conversation but to enable it. To fail to regulate a conversation is not to promote openness but to privilege certain voices for reasons other than their merit: loudness, lack of self-awareness, a superabundance of free time, and ignorance of the topic at hand, for instance.

Here are some things for which we routinely regulate a class discussion, which I think we should also regulate in online spaces designed for high-level discussions:

• One voice dominating the discussion (as The Onion has so eloquently explained)


• Irrelevant comments.


• Counterproductive (as opposed to productive) questioning of fundamental premises. A course in evolutionary biology won't get very far when twenty minutes of every class are taken up by students disputing the legitimacy of the fossil record.


• Ignorance inappropriate for the context: not having taken the prerequisite, not having done the assigned reading.

It might be argued that, since online discussions aren't bound in time and space is potentially infinite, there's plenty of room for de facto trolling in addition to on-point discussions. But as I've argued previously, even where space is infinite, attention is not. It isn't worth my time to hand-sort a comment thread that's 30 or 40 percent irrelevant, self-aggrandizing, self-linking, or otherwise trolliform comments. If we fail to regulate these voices, then the shy students will never be heard, and the smart students will be irritated and start doing crossword puzzles (or rather, defect to some better regulated blog). That's not openness.

So what would a truly productive online academic discussion require? Editing. Moderation. Curation. Someone empowered to make these calls, who is smart and cares--often somebody who is paid to be smart and to care, because this work takes time. Information may want to be free, but sometimes unless we pay for it, all we'll get is noise.

*I guess I should back up for a moment and note that this blog hardly has any commenting at all, and while I do get the occasional troll or spammer, they're deleted so swiftly and heatlessly that they're never a problem.

Also, since this blog rarely gets comments, I've come to know of various readers' existences in very unexpected ways. For instance, once a reader introduced himself to me in a coffee shop. Naturally I had no idea who he was, but the whole thing was charmingly uncanny. The issue of blog sociality might warrant a separate post. Or not.)

Et in Arcadia ego; or, une coulée de clartés

I'm very excited to have started working on Arcade, a "digital salon." I like its seriousness and its interdisciplinarity, and I'm hoping to help make it even better.

Come and visit!

Il y avait là une cohue, un défilé pénible et lent, reserré entre les boutiques. C'était, sous les vitres blanchies de reflets, un violent éclairage, une coulée de clartés, des globes blancs, des lanternes rouges, des transparents bleues, des rampes de gaz...

      --Émile Zola on the Passage des panoramas, Nana (1880)

This blog gets a lot of google hits from people looking for a Works Cited entry for this or that. Generally, these people fundamentally don't get the concept of a Works Cited list (if that's you: here you go).

But today I got the best search string ever: "fortune cookie works cited."

O grad student (and I have no doubt that you are a grad student), good luck with that. I'm pretty sure the MLA hasn't nailed that one down yet.

Did Blogger just change my style sheet?

2010

I don't really do new year's resolutions, but there are a few things I think I'd like to do with this blog. This blog has always been a little meandering, sometimes about teaching, often about idle thoughts in my areas of non-expertise (which are numerous). I feel that teaching warrants a lot of public musing, in no small part because I know I have readers who will give me valuable feedback and, when I'm lucky, actual gorgeous writing handouts of their own devising. I've also been teaching using blogs for a few years now, and the process of blogging is to me intimately connected with my work as a teacher; both are forms of publication in a very democratic way.*

But there's something very safe about talking about teaching and topics on which I do not claim to be an expert (or on topics that are a "secondary" specialty, like children's lit). It is a greater challenge to talk about one's specialty to nonspecialists, in part because you have to get outside your own thinking habits and remember others' habits, but also because one's own research is dear, and tender, and (one believes) wants sheltering, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick has pointed out. But I believe that the future of the profession lies in letting ideas circulate as much as possible, and in supporting a spirit of inquiry in the public sphere. Let me then publish where I may.

So these are the intentions:

1. To blog more frequently about my own tender babies, my research in progress;

2. To review more books. I'm an enormous fan of NBOL-19, the goal of which is to review books within a year of their publication. Imagine! I think it's an admirable goal, and would in general like to see the profession move toward timely feedback on scholarly work. Last year I believe I only reviewed one book, Kathleen Woodward's Statistical Panic, and while part of me has visions of reviewing, say, a book a month, I am in fact acquainted with reality. I will be happy, then, if I review two books this year, though I hope I will do more. And perhaps, too, I will write mini-reviews, even one-line reviews. Which brings me to another notion:

3. To review articles from time to time, however briefly. I do have the Zotero feed, of course, but I read more articles than full monographs, and some of them are just awesome. Why not say why?

These are not resolutions but ideas. I have a habit that I believe to be healthy, namely ignoring the blog when things get hectic. So that's that. But ask me, sometime, about lol-articles...

*I say that blogging and teaching are "democratic" in the full knowledge that not everyone has access to the internet and even fewer people have access to the University of California. But then, not everybody is able to vote, either. Democracy is always partial; we can but move in a democratic direction. What I mean, in this case, is that scholarship occurs by way of both specialized and nonspecialized conversations (alternatively, specialized and nonspecialized forms of public-ation). Teaching and blogging are both part of the nonspecialized conversation.

[My write-up of a recent poetry reading is now up on the department blog. I might add that I had the pleasure of speaking with Anne Tardos and Maurice Scully after the reading; they were both lovely.]

Our reliance on the stupidity of computers is an endless source of comedy

Google's great achievement, supposedly, is using its search capabilities to match ads to keywords in order to target people who actually might be interested in them. But anecdotally I would say that this leads to a high percentage of unintentionally hilarious, supremely inappropriate ads, whereas in days of yore perhaps this was more rare.

Whenever I clean out my gmail spam folder, Google Ads never fails to offer me some spam casserole recipes, and if I notice them I tend to have a double reaction of dissonance: first, the switch from thinking of spam in the sense that I've explicitly gone into this folder to tackle to spam-in-a-tin, and then the slightly ill feeling one gets from thinking of spam-in-a-tin.

It occurs to me to wonder why one would put ads on the spam folder in the first place. It is, after all, by design and definition, the place where unwanted ads go to die. But then, maybe that's the only natural home for spam casserole recipes.

On citing works

This post is for the poor lost souls who keep winding up here after googling "works cited for [title]."

I am guessing that you're about fourteen and have only just learned about this whole "citation" thing. So here's the drill.

A works cited list gives people the information necessary to track down a source that you used: author, title, volume, publisher, date, etc.

There are several different citation styles. But if you're looking for "works cited," then chances are you're using MLA (Modern Language Association) format, one of two standard formats in the humanities (the other is Chicago).

In general, you won't have much success googling for the citation of a particular source. But that's okay, because there are standard templates for citing various kinds of sources, and you can easily figure out how to use them.

You'll find a nice summary of MLA style guidelines at Purdue University's inestimable Online Writing Lab (OWL).

Here's an MLA citation for a single-author book:

Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

[Altieri, Charles] is the author. The last name comes first in a works cited list, because you will want to alphabetize your entries. In a footnote (in Chicago style, for instance) you would not invert the name, because there would be no need to alphabetize.


[Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry] is the title.


[Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989] is the publication information: city, name of publisher (the UP stands for University Press; it's a standard abbreviation), year of publication.

Each of these categories is treated like a little sentence and ends with a period.

* * *

The MLA Handbook recently came out in its seventh edition, with a few notable style changes (notable, that is, if you were already using MLA 6). APA usually calls its list of works a "Reference List," while Chicago style has an optional bibliography in addition to footnotes or endnotes.

Here are a few more useful links:

APA (The OWL at Purdue University)

Chicago (there may be a paywall)

And for the benefit of all you "Stephen Crane study guide" googlers out there, here's the OWL's page on avoiding plagiarism. Remember that avoiding plagiarism is your responsibility.

Over and out.

Works cited

I've finally come up with a title for this blog.

Citation, appropriation, and pastiche are the postmodern techniques par excellence, and yet for some reason this seems to go hand in hand with a willful resistance to documentation of any kind. Yesterday I read a review of a book that I respect; the reviewer excoriated the author for being "an appalling writer." The crime? Referring too frequently to her scholarly predecessors and interlocutors! Evidently that's just too boring to be allowed. Heaven forbid that a reader be made to take notice of a heterogeneous intellectual tradition. I've even heard someone complain about an editor noting textual variants in the endnotes. What?

I love citations. They help me do my work, follow up on interests, figure out the terrain. I hate it when books have endnotes but not a comprehensive bibliography. I despise an edition that has no note on the editorial principles. The more apparatus the better.

So here's to works cited in the age of appropriation.

Excellent google search string of the day: "students who feel that their classes are boring or useless." Hah!

Jeff Sypeck posts some of his google search strings. (Sypeck is the author of Becoming Charlemagne.)

New readers continue to find “Quid Plura?” through the thaumaturgy of the modern search engine. Below in bold are some of their stranger searches. I’ve endeavored to add helpful responses on the off chance they didn’t find the answers they were looking for.

beowulf fungus
One of my college roommates contracted the Beowulf fungus. Afterwards, people found it impossible to date him with any certainty.

how stupid is sir gawain?
Gawain is so stupid, it takes him two hours to watch “60 Minutes”!
Gawain is so stupid, he took an umbrella to see “Purple Rain”!
Gawain is so stupid, he thought Sherlock Holmes was a housing project!
Gawain is so stupid, he believed that every instance of the final inflectional -e in MS Cotton Nero A.x was unsounded because he had overlooked the possibility that specifically poetic archaisms may not have existed in prose and failed to consider that an unsounded final -e might corrupt the meter in at least a dozen places in the manuscript!

becoming charlemagne summary
Becoming Charlemagne is the story of the emperor who won renown as the inventor of gargling, which prior to that time had been practiced only furtively by a remote tribe of Saxons who passed the secret down from father to son as part of their oral tradition.

becoming charlemagne sparknotes
Set against the turbulent backdrop of 19th-century Russia, Becoming Charlemagne is the story of a young princess who gradually awakens to her own potential as a poet, a lover, and a queen. (Tell your teacher you found this summary on the author’s Web site. You will astonish her.) [Her? -- N.C.]

Read the whole post for the most hilarious of these search strings. (Via Ducks and Drakes.)

Curiously, ever since I wrote that post on Mary Hoffman and Diana Wynne Jones, I've gotten a large number of searches on cross-dressing.