Tag: archive

“Your Head Will Pop Off”

/ dmueller

Feedlied across this snapshot of John Feathers’ vast collection of maps, city guides (mostly from Los Angeles), and pamphlets–an innocuous archive or impressive case of cartographic hoarding, I don’t know. The archive, its unusual ordinariness, its scale, its discovery, all of this is interesting, or passingly so for map enthusiasts, the sharpest thumbtack of this piece for my thinking is from the video, the note near the end about the memorial function of maps, their capacity for temporal-affective relocation, their dormant-until-brightly-lit teleportation function: when-where, an interlacing of spacetime. After the pragmatic, what do maps want more than this?

All My Lifio

/ dmueller

Leading the way among my web platform crushes for 2008 is drop.io, simple private sharing. My fondness for this app grows deeper every day. I have an account set up for the section of WRT195 I’m teaching right now, and it couldn’t be much better for uploading and sharing PDFs, slide shows, documents, and audio clips. I simply password protected the account (one of the options when you set up an account), and presto. Students only need the URL and the password. Plus, when students log on to drop.io, they can easily glance the contents of any file by clicking on it. They don’t have to download the files to view the contents. I’m hooked.

Already I can tell that I will be using more slideshow stuff this semester than I have in years past. For one, I am in a cramped space. It wasn’t looking too bad when there were just twelve students enrolled, but within the past week eight more students have added, pushing us to the upper threshold of twenty. On Tuesday, there were a total of nineteen chairs in the room, counting the one my teacherly can was parked on (first come, first served, I say). Really there were only nineteen (counting me) in class that day, and no empty seats; two more have added since, and I had to put in an email request so we will be sure to have enough chairs tomorrow. My point: It’s a cramped space. And rather than shimmy pardon me, excuse me, sorry over to the marker board, I think I will use the projector as a temporary solution. Plus, I can refine my slideshow style with this practice.

Nice about drop.io is that I can drop the slidshow into the quick-drop plugin in Firefox, and there it is: viewable online. It’s slick.

Another thing: drop.io is founded on the idea of limited shelf life: after a year of inactivity, the drop evaporates and with it all of the content uploaded to it. A good match for certain course materials in that it doesn’t flirt with all the niceties (and idealisms) of permanent archivization.

Writing Feverlets*

/ dmueller

Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

Continue reading →

Narrative, Database

/ dmueller

Today I read Ed Folsom’s PMLA article, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” and the better part of the five responses to the piece and even Folsom’s response to the responses. I won’t attempt a full summary in this entry, but I wanted to note a few initial impressions and lingering questions.

The lead article discusses Folsom’s efforts to develop The Walt Whitman Archive, a growing digital collection of Whitman’s works–works not easily or summarily identifiable as narrative or as poetry. Folsom characterizes Whitman as a forerunner, noting that “[f]or him, the works was a kind of preelectronic database, and his notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars–sights and sounds and names and activities–that he dutifully enters into the record” (1574). The identification of Whitman as an “early practitioner…of the database genre” (1575) doesn’t, as far as I can tell, explain why his work should be any more appropriate for digitization and databased setup than any other, but it does give us the background on Folsom’s insights into database as genre.

Continue reading →

CCC Online as Teleidoscope

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

Inside Higher Ed is running
Collin’s piece
today about CCC Online called

"Mirror, Mirror on the Web."  The column puts a
beam on CCC Online
and introduces a few of the features of the site, but beyond that–and more
importantly, I’d say–it makes explicit some of the ways blog-based thinking
influenced the creation of the site.  As the article makes plain, the three
of us working on the project are active bloggers;  I think it’s safe to say
that the practice of blogging made the current iteration of CCC Online conceivable. 

Continue reading →

CCC Online

/ dmueller

Collin’s
entry says more about it than I plan to in this short-minute post, but I
wanted to mark the day.  The CCCat’s out of the bag, so to speak; 
CCC Online is
officially live, which means you should visit the site and check out the
features. And of course, if you have any impressions one way or another, we’d
like to hear about them.