Clouds to the Left of Me, Clouds to the Right

Cloud Parallax

Finished fine-tuning my cloud-parallactic contribution to a roundtable at the CCCC in Atlanta later this week. We forecasters are predicting a sitting-room (i.e., entire row to yourself?) crowd for N.30 session, 12:30-1:45 p.m. on Saturday. As for the fine-tuning, I’m pleased enough with the changes, and I had to work especially hard to resist incorporating more than a cliche or two from Stealers Wheel, e.g., “Trying to make some science of it all, but I can see it makes no science at all.” Yes, the paper is–it’s hard to believe–better because I axed a half-dozen lines like this from it.

And in case you can’t make it to N.30, maybe because you are at the Braves-Phillies game, the good news is that we can catch up on Thursday in the poster galleria, Room M301, Marquis Level, between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., where I’ll be standing quietly next to my first ever attempt at an academic poster. For the full poster experience, it’s best if you pre-install a QR code-scanning app on your mobile device.

When The Last Database

My CCCC talk from last Thursday:

When The Last Database You Search Is Not Your Own from Derek Mueller on Vimeo.

Our panel, D.24, was relatively well attended. I printed 30 handouts, and we probably had an audience with that many people or a few more. Bradley has posted his presentation already. Alex may well do the same soon. We talked on Wednesday afternoon over a late lunch about whether or not we would put them online, and we easily agreed that web traffic for presentations like these generates far more exposure to the ideas than the conference venue alone. Feels like a case of pointing out the nose-on-face obvious (will this video get 30 views?), but there are a couple of different discussions this week on WPA-L, a rhetoric and composition listserv/variety hour, about problems fairly typical at national conventions: crowded, over-attended sessions and their opposite, the one-member-audience (a generous friend or colleague, no doubt). Whether the fire marshal was turning late-comers away at the door or whether the carpet mites were the only audience on hand to listen and ask questions, why not post the talk?

A couple of other points: We remixed our talks, delivering them in turn, three by three. The Q&A was terrific; we took several questions and enjoyed thoughtful conversation for the last 30 minutes of the session. Finally, all questions, ideas, suggestions, and insights are welcome in the comments or via email.