Drift Types

Early this morning I read Michael Finkel’s recent GQ article, “Here Be Monsters,” about three Tokelauan teens who survived fifty-one days adrift at sea. It proved an uncanny read on the Kindle, considering I pushed it there mostly to try out Readability’s new “Send to Kindle” option, and I have also been slow-slow-Kindle-reading Arum and Roksa’s report on the failures of colleges, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Some sort of reading device-based juxtaposition in this, I guess.

The fruits of this pollenation, if they can be called fruits and not flotsam, include a hypothetical reading list for a course I will probably never teach on different types of drifting (dreaming it up, so let’s consider it a course on curriculum).

From “Here Be Monsters,”

Some-times boats are blown off course; there’s even a Tokelauan word for this: lelea. It’s theorized that the very existence of people on the island–is has been inhabited for a thousand years–is because a Polynesian canoe drifted off course. But there is also another, more complicated Tokelauan word: tagavaka. This applies to boats that have purposely sailed away–for love, adventure, or suicide.

What, for example, comes of viewing academic drift in terms of lelea and tagavaka? And what of the here/there reference to monsters (in the article’s title) might productively refocus academy drift characterizations on drifting from and drifting toward?

And we would need additional readings in this speculative scenario: Singer’s “The Castaways,” Menand’s “Live and Learn” (an ENGL328 student just shared this one with me), Haynes’ inestimable “Writing Offshore,” and, why not?, something on The Essex. And, it’s undeniable, I wrote an entry a lot like this one just about four years ago. I have continued in the intervening years to drift away from and, having surrendered to currents, back toward ideas like these–ideas rekindled, of course, by my dissatisfaction with academic drift-states cast too singularly as a problem to be buoyed simply by resetting drifters on a fixed, positionally precise course.

The “Here Be Monsters” article includes a nod to assessment from a New Zealand psychiatrist who examined the boys: “‘They won’t ever forget this,’ he says. ‘It won’t be put out of their minds. But young people tend to be resilient, able to work through tragedies with reasonably good long-term results.'”

“Rain” AND “Routes”

Imagined Geographies

A Wednesday morning. 9 a.m. An hour into the day’s office hours. This is the first rainy day of the semester; high humidity makes for a muggy Equinox Eve. Soon I will pack my things and walk a GPStimated three-quarters of a mile across campus to teach my first class of the day, ENGL326: Research Writing, in which we will develop short lists of Halavaisian engine-searching precepts and then step through the setting up of Google Search Alerts via RSS.

The rain will make today’s walking sloppier–a puddle-dodging trek past the library and the science building. This is a new problem intensified (potentially) by the temporary relocation of our campus offices. On teaching days this semester I walk almost three miles back and forth across campus: Rackham, Hoyt, McKenny, Hoyt, Rackham, Bowen Lot. When the weather makes clear skies and 68F, all of the back and forth is fine. But when it rains. But when it rains.

And then there’s an unexpected umbrella frailty, or umbrailty if you are still in the mood for new words on this gray morning: my finest umbrella, an old and sturdy stand-by since my time in Syracuse, is failing. The handle slips off from time to time, and now it will not close up for stowing. The clasp does not catch. The canopy wants always to be open (a sure sign of its late-life wish for vigor and lasting purpose), and this makes some people think my unkempt umbrella is the cause for today’s showers. I have a second umbrella. Green and free (a gift from REC/IM), it does not withstand winds like the aging gear I just described. For today, at least, it might be enough to keep me dry and out of scorn-shot from the superstitious out there.

Halavais, Search Engine Society (2009)

A couple of months have lapsed since I read Alex Halavais’s Search Engine Society; in fact, I read it in June while flying to Santa Fe and back. I need to return my copy to the library, and I wanted to post a few brief notes. Search Engine Society is a terrific introduction to search engines. Halavais achieves a nice (and what I would describe as a successful) balance between accessible prose and theoretical rigor. That is, I found the book exceedingly readable, but I could at the same time see frequently enough the theoretical surroundings Halavais brought to bear. Certainly it left me with the impression this book could have been more forwardly theoretical in its examination of search engines, but that it seamlessly achieves both is one reason I will be assigning a chapter for undergraduates this semester and I will likely include the full book this winter in ENGL516: Computers and Writing: Theory and Practice.

At just more than 200 pages, the book includes an introduction and eight chapters: 1. The Engines, 2. Searching (which I will ask students to read in ENGL326: Research Writing), 3. Attention, 4. Knowledge and Democracy, 5. Censorship, 6. Privacy, 7. Sociable Search, and 8. Future Finding. Among Halavais’s opening acknowledgments are that data on searching practices is hard to come by. Public search engines capture a certain amount of data about queries and the IP addresses from which they are made, but we still have much to learn about how search is deployed privately, as when computer users look for files on their hard drives. The coverage of early chapters includes how search engines work, the history of searching the web, the known limitations of presumably whole-web search engines, the web-cultural importance of specialized search engines, crawlers, currency, the rise of social search, and much more. Again, what’s here might seem–to one with an advanced technical understanding of search engines–like a broad survey, but I would add as a counterpoint that there’s plenty here in terms of references and context to prime beginners to these–what I regard as an increasingly important set of issues.

I have adopted Ch. 2 for ENGL326 because it gets into issues of superficial or complacent (i.e., self-satisfied) search. Drawing on work by Hargittai and others, Halavais establishes how willing searchers are to scratch the surface. So, we will seek to extend questions Halavais poses, such as “How can you know which terms, or combination of terms, best targets the information you are after?” into our own work with Search Alerts and RSS. The chapter also gets into the value of serendipity for invention, the limitations of semantic search for different file types, re-finding, the invisible/deep web, “berrypicking” (Bates), and adaptive search: much, in other words, that will be of some use to students concerned with research writing.

Halavais’s last two chapters bear on my research interests, as well. His discussion of sociable search touches upon collaborative filtering and tracing associations and challenges conventional sensibilities about the search engine as an algorithmic mechanism (that subdues agency or that disguises and promotes a malevolent corporate agenda). I appreciated that the book confronts–though perhaps not with especially clear cut solutions–questions of cultural production intrinsic to search engines, e.g., “Who will know?” (190). The “who will know?” question echoed for me with Foster’s “I will not know,” with disciplinary assumptions about the adequacy of search and databases. Halavais concludes the book with the “who will know?” question, noting that “[t]he term ‘search engine’ is far too prosaic for the role that search plays” (190).

More:
“Search personalization represents one of the most active areas of research, but, as with search generally, by privileging certain sources over others there is the danger that a searcher can become trapped by her own search history” (52).

“The internet and the web likewise have been disruptive to the way attention is aggregated and distributed, and so it is worth asking whether there is a similar ‘tyranny of the web'” (58).” Or, for that matter, whether attention fatigue is to blame for the “Death of the Web.” Interesting to think that a preference for a locatable web (via search, via attention-corralled, if gated, networks) yields, if not the death of the web, a catatonic (kata- -tonos), or toned-down, web.

Singing the Search

For several weeks after I’d happily accepted EMU’s offer of a faculty
position, the dmueller-edition Q&A recordings continued churning through my
portable MP3 player every so often. By then I found them somewhat
silly-sounding, an off-key sequence of quirky, wandering think-alouds, something like little pacts
between me, my iPod Shuffle, and Kathryn Hume, whose

Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt
was never out of reach from September
through late February. I finally removed the tracks after CCCC, more than
a month after I no longer needed to listen to those droning loops of me
rehearsing 120-second answers.

Continue reading →

Reinventing the Wheel

Despite an abbreviated work session this morning, I found time to download and
install the latest version of CMap Tools, an
application I grew fond of during coursework and then inexplicably uninstalled
twenty months ago, just after I used it to map the dissertation I’ve been
working at ever since. About the latest version: what’s not to love?  I thought
about it in the first place because I had a few ideas for a new map-sketch, the
raw start to an article I intend to draft before summer’s end.

I’ll say more about the application and the article another time, perhaps,
but all of this is a roundabout way of getting to the more pressing issue:
because I re-installed CMap Tools, I also rediscovered an old, forgotten
myscot wheel
folder.  The myscot wheel is an idiosyncratic cluster of mascots from programs where
I’ve worked and studied, a wheel because the figures are arranged in a circle.
For just over two months, since mid-February, I’ve had cause to add to it,
celebratory
cause. 

Myscot Wheel (update)

The new, improved wheel gives it away. As the culmination of my
job search, eight weeks ago I accepted a position for this coming fall as an Assistant Professor of
English at Eastern Michigan University
In addition to being so warmly welcomed by great colleagues and preparing for a
job I look forward to starting, the move to Ypsi-Arbor later this summer also means something of a homecoming for me. I
grew up in Michigan and have always referred to it proudly as home.

As tempted as I am to gush on, I’ll refrain for now and instead
loosely commit to a series–eventual entries on the position, on the courses I will be
teaching in the fall, on the market and anything worth sharing about how I
approached it. But there you have today’s circuit: CMap Tools, an updated myscot wheel,
and an upbeat announcement about joining EMU.

MT 4.2

I just bussed in all of the upgrade files for Movable Type 4.2, so I had to
hustle together an entry to see whether it lives up to the
hoopla,
especially the faster page-creation times, which had become downright arthritic
with the latest releases (e.g., 4.x).

So far, I can offer the following (exclamation-style, so as to keep
with the mood of 4.2’s release):

  • the upgrade was a cinch. That’s good!
  • my search form is broken. That’s bad!
  • the basic templates held up. That’s good!
  • I will have to install a dummy blog and ransack its templates to
    troubleshoot the search error, and I have no time for that. That’s
    bad!
  • a full site rebuild took less then seven minutes. Good!
  • posting this entry took something like four seconds. Faster than before!

I still haven’t read any of the release materials closely enough to figure
out the difference between MT 4.2 and MT Pro. For now, my justification is
not only a case of the late-summer lazies, but also a principled objection to
the "Pro" designation, which, for my purposes, would be better if it were "Am"
or, on the best of days, "Pro-Am."