Into the Long Tail

Considering that this entry ends my longest blogging drought since early
July, you might have wondered what’s been happening lately.  I’ve gone and
followed up a personal-best thirty-one entries in the month of September with a
three-day lull in blogging.  To be completely honest, I devoted a lot of
time and energy this week to developing and fine-tuning a paper I shared late
this morning at the Contesting Public Memories Conference here in Syracuse. 
The cross-disciplinary conference continues tomorrow, bringing together folks
from a variety of specializations, a variety of places.  In the paper,
"Networked Writing as Micro-Monument: The Long Tail’s Nested Memoria," I was
going for a three-part argument about the persistence of social/shared memories
in the niches of blogspace.  To attempt the triple leap, I discussed John
Lovas’s weblog, micro-monument in relation to Chris Anderson’s articulation of
the long tail, and ways in which memorable personal intensities punctuate the
long tail by applying Barthes’s studium/punctum.  That’s where my mind has
been–stuck in the long tail for three days or so.

On a related note, I’m thinking through a few of the lessons I’ve learned
related to this project and this week:

  • Mid-semester conferences are difficult when they include writing
    significant pieces of the paper and the paper doesn’t match with other
    coursework and teaching demands.
  • The power law and

    long tail
    are immensely useful concepts for network studies, but they’re
    difficult to introduce with any crispness to people who haven’t heard of
    Anderson’s
    project
    .  I suspect that this problem isn’t unique to the long tail. 
    A similar bind comes up when we try to generalize a complex idea in
    application to a subject people are hearing about or thinking about for the
    first time.  I should be clear that this isn’t a direct response to
    anything that came up today.  It’s more like a sense I have that I didn’t
    do enough to develop the long tail’s relevance as a model for social memory.
  • I have a new self-improvement project: write more small pieces that, with
    some revision and tuning, can gel into usable material for future conferences. 
    I haven’t decided that everything should be published to the weblog, but it’s
    clear enough that I need to work on two things:  (-1-) periodically
    aerate the ultra-condensed grad-student style and (-2-) start thinking about
    blog entries as mini-series or concatenations of developable projects.

That’s probably enough for now, although it doesn’t exhaust the dim sense of
ought-to‘s.  For the remainder of the weekend, I’m on with reading
I’ve neglected–the rest of Tufte on data visualizations and Dunnier’s
Sidewalk
.  Also, in 307 on Monday we’re starting The ClueTrain
Manifesto
and attempting our own collaborative Writer’s Cluetrain. Going to
shine some attention on that as well.

2 Comments

  1. It occured to me yesterday evening, before reading this, that the 20 minutes of a presentation really isn’t enough time to do anything but ski a dark surface.

    That the panel presentation is a strange genre. One we don’t really get *taught* how to put ourselves into.

    I still contend your content, delivery, and slides were all sharp, well-done, and (for me anyway) eye-opening.

  2. It it strange, M., and it’s double-strange at an interdisciplinary conference where our positions or stances are even less easy to anticipate. Thanks for the nice words. I was just thinking–like we talked about–that my bit was shaky because I skimped on explaining the nuances of Anderson’s project.

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