Tag: CCCC

When The Last Database

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

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.

Beware the Red-Ides

/ Derek Mueller

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

/ Derek Mueller / 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

/ Derek Mueller

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.

Continue reading →

And Returns

/ Derek Mueller

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.

Continue reading →

CCCCorny "Blog"

/ Derek Mueller / 6 Comments

The Blogora’s Jim Aune writes of
joining the CCCC, and in
doing so, he refers to a blog "they’ve" started, aptly titled
CCCC. I saw Jim’s entry
yesterday and hurried across the a-href to see the blog to which he
referred.

Continue reading →

Lloyd-Jones on Centrality

/ Derek Mueller / 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.