Tag: CCCC

Beware the Red-Ides

/ dmueller

Following last night’s red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York, here I sit in JFK, awaiting a-w-a-i-t-i-n-g my connecting flight to the travel destination nightmare better known as Syracuse. I only chose this flight on jetBlue because I had a voucher from last year’s CCCC in New Orleans. On the way home a year ago I had no choice but to stay over an extra night (put up on the airline’s dime at a divey Days Inn). I also accepted a credit for the full value of that trip, good for one year. The short (and miserable) of it is that I’ve been sitting in JFK since 7 a.m. this morning, holding out for an 11 a.m. hop upstate: home again (for a few more months, anyway). Only: delayed! I’m trying not to look at the monitor over gate G9 because every time I look the staffBlues bump the boarding time ahead another 15 minutes. 12:00 p.m. 12:15 p.m. 12:30 p.m. I’m afraid that if I look again it will roll over to 12:45 p.m.

No, I can’t really complain about the free wireless in the fancy new jetBlue terminal. It’s nice, very nice. But I can say, plaintive though it it sure to sound, that these hours of waiting are intensely uncomfortable, time slowed to a creeping pace, after flying through the night for the first leg of the return trip.

H.16orn Tooting

/ dmueller / 3 Comments

In step with Jenny and

Scot, whose posts have alerted me to attend their respective panels at
CCCC (although,
Scot–8 a.m.?), I thought I should take advantage of the opportunity to promote yet
another session at the upcoming convention. So, where should you be at 11:00
a.m. next Friday, April 4? Why, in the Elmwood Room on the Third Floor of
the Hilton Riverside in N.O., of course, for H.16 Digital Research Ecologies:
How Journal Web Sites Are Answering New Media’s Challenges.

Do you need more encouragement? So be it. Here I give you the title slide
from my talk.

More still?

We are presenting in room #12, not far from the swimming pool, which means
you could bring your towel for a dip before or after the talk (or to hold over
your mouth as an ad hoc filter for those sharp, chest-stabbing whiffs of
chlorine). If, on the other hand, you skip the H sessions to go swimming, we
will see you as we walk by, and perhaps even bear a small, short-lived grudge.
Heh, I’m kidding about that last part. Anyway, come along to H.16 and
we’ll grab lunch afterward.

Apparently there is seating enough for between 96 and 176 (depending on
whether the chairs are "classroom" or "theater" styled).

Clouds, Graphs, Maps

/ dmueller

A couple of days ago Mike posted notes on
my

CCCC talk from late last month, and I was reminded that I’m at least ten days
past due on the video
I said I would
produce following the conference.

I recorded the talk to an mp3 yesterday afternoon and went to
campus last night where I planned to use iMovie to sync the audio with jpegs of
the slides. Because the slideshow includes text, I needed to get the
resolution right, but, well, it started to get late. I started to get impatient.
I was able to output a reasonably readable mp4 file, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get
Google Video or
Daily Motion to encode it.
Finally Jumpcut accepted the file, so it’s
available below the fold (even if much of it suffers from jaggies). The original mp4 is available for download
here.

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And Returns

/ dmueller

Ph. and I whistled into the Syracuse train depot yesterday afternoon; we’re
home from the excursion to the conference. Everything is unpacked,
laundered, put away.

I have plans to put the paper to an mp3 and sync it with the slides. I
can do this, of course, because my talk was scripted. It’s endlessly
reproducible as a result. But recording will have to wait until I shake off the
cough-inducing tickle that has been getting the best of me all day today.
Sure, I could delete out any of the hacking and rattling that makes its way into
the mix, but why? I’ll just wait it out.

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Lloyd-Jones on Centrality

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

In "A View from the Center," his 1977 CCCC keynote address, here’s what
Richard Lloyd-Jones said about Mrs. Peterson, "the emblem" of those in his
audience:

Some will share a memory with me–the recollection of picking up the phone,
cranking one long ring, and getting "central." You could ring various
combinations of shorts and longs and get specific subscribers directly, but if
you really wanted to know what was going on in the village you rang
"central."

The folks in bigger towns, which had numbers, had to call central in order
to be hooked up to anybody else on the system, but their central didn’t know
much except numbers, and out central had a name–Mrs. Peterson–and she knew
all sorts of things. Somehow, in the village, she knew who was at the
bank, who had gone down to the ice house, who hadn’t been feeling well.
I don’t know that she listened in on all the conversations, but we supposed
so. She just made herself central in the life of the community. In our more
urban and perhaps urbane way, we would think of her as a communication nexus,
but we’d to better to remember Mrs. Peterson as Central. (49)

Compositionist as pastoral telephone operator. A communication nexus.
This isn’t the only metaphor Lloyd-Jones invokes in the talk, but it is the
piece that resonates most with network studies. Whatever her methods
(eavesdropping? Mrs. Peterson!), she is knowing because of a high degree of
centrality, her niche in a reasonably sized network. When network
become too large, the connector’s knowledge diminishes. Thresholds: Central
knows only numbers in densely populated areas.

Nothing to add beyond that. Just reading for exams,
posting notes,
and thinking Lloyd-Jones was talking about network centrality in his address out
in Kansas City some years ago.

Conference Rewind

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

Finally I’m resetting the needle to a groove, settling in for the intensive
few weeks until semester’s end, and shaking off the thrill of conversation
and catching up throughout the stay in Chicago. I had a good conference despite
the sting of $leeping in the conference hotel. It was great to finally meet
a host of folks I’ve known casually in blogspace–Marcia,
Debbie,
Spencer,
Krista,
Jeff, and
Bradley. Blogging–whatever else
can be said of it–gives folks a fuller presence at the conference (judging by
the last two Cs); this idea–of quasi-professional connection–is what we were just beginning to get at in the SIG on
Friday evening.

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