Thoughts on an STS day

Spent the day in conference. Click for program. Rose too early. Does anyone in conference hotel sleep until alarm goes off? Started Jerome Loving’s biography of the yawper when could not sleep. A bit late to breakfast. Started Twittering with a yawp as I’ve been wearing Whitman hat recently. We Stowe scholars feel pretty thorough when when we’ve read three or four biographies. To be a Whitmanian, it seems like you’ve got to pick your top seven.

Enjoyed keynotes (David Stork and Will Noel) on light, math, and reading paintings and Archimedes. And attended presentation of Jason Rhody of (ODH and NEH). From tweets on Rhody, a new implementation grant planned for NEH on 2012, Feb, 50K-300K, 2 to 5 offered, competitive, after Startup (or not), depends on budget. (Write your congressperson). What DH startups can do: research, tools, impact of, scholarly communication. See scripto.org for transcribing historical papers (a crowdsource project) which my students in Civil War memory course might be interested in). Maybe that’s a way to edit all eleventy-seven editions of UTC. What the heck, guess I’ll write Scripto contact and imagine.

After lunch, with Andrew Jewell who filled me in on progress with Scholarly Editing (forthcoming remixed journal of Association for Documentary Editing), yes, Andy Jewell, he who in presentation co-written with Amanda Gailey yesterday confessed to preferring a 5-year old technology called TEI to the new stuff. Andy once told me that nothing in world of scholarship is as tough as working at Wal-Mart. And I was able to agree and think in my mind—but not tell him because it’s an old story—that nothing in scholarship is as bad as working in a chicken processing plant freezer, as extruding foam box inserts, as using an inverted pipe to put up barbed wire fence posts, as painting a house, as working as Mcdonald’s fry cook. Pass silently by as you wipe a tear.

After lunch to presentation by Natalie Kalich and Russell McDonald. Kalich offered a neat reading of Woolf and British Vogue but also turned to Corravubias, who also illustrated Stowe, and in Vogue published type-sketches entitled “Enter the New Negro” (1925) and “Negro de Nos Jours” (1927) Fascinating stuff (to me) because Thomas Kemble, illustrator of Huckleberry Finn (and later Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is criticized for racism of Twain images but praised for for Stowe images. What is this “type” thing that illustrators were doing in the 1920s? Fascinating because of my own other work about type and stereotype.

Tried to be too fancy for afternoon session and split between Daphna Atias, Meg Meiman, and H Wayne Story (had to switch sessions twice) and thus made door noises. Atias fascinating on authorial selection rather than intention (derived from Schulze on Moore), and on natural selection. Time to go back and read Mays on Coleridge, McGann on Mays (doing what reads to me—when I began it—as a riff on what Patterson did to Kane-Donaldson) and Schulze’s introduction to Moore), because Stowe, I think, was working “local fitness to environment, not fixing” (Schulze by way of Atias). Meiman reminds us that what scholars do differs from what they say, but I’m happy I just send students straight to JSTOR and ProjectMuse, because that’s what scholars do. Storey confirms same type of work that Atias illustrates with Dickinson goes on with Dante and Boccaccio. Regret missing Bornstein, Schulze, and West, and so toss a little disgruntled under-my-breath grrrh at Matthew Kirshenbaum, who schedules three of my favorite sessions at the same time. He didn’t even ask me. I’m really not complaining because he has done a phenomenal job of re-mixing STS. Learned later from Peter S. that I had reason to regret missing Schulze’s presentation, but what’s one to do?

Get grumpy and skip out the late session, and thus offering permission tomorrow for anyone who needs to skip mine for same reason. Fortunately, one of the great scholars of typography, T. H. Howard-Hill, was reading the newspaper in a too-sunny chair, and I wanted to ask him about ways to think about typographical space. Was schooled, and humbled. Told George Bornstein a little story about spacing and typography, which he appreciated. I owe him more than one story for what he’s done on Gates edition of UTC. Had dinner and nice chat with Barbara Bordalejo and Alex Gils. Regret that I have not yet talked to Jessica De Spain, who is working on another great sentimental text, Wide Wide World. Back to my room to call home, say Hi to family, and prepare this post. Wonder why I signed up for DH Day, because it looks like a lot of work.

On melancholy at STS

Here at STS 2011 (at Penn State, not NYU), Morris Eaves set an elegiac tone with a meditative keynote on oblivion, the works of the past that scholars dream of recovering as a counterpoint to technofantasies of absolute visual and aural recall.

He put me in mind of Borges’s Funes the Memorious. Funes is cursed by perfect memory, the ability to remember every leaf on every tree. To manage, to calm the chaos in his mind, which denies him the ability to abstract and think, he catalogs every sensation. To sleep he imagines the interior of houses that he only knows by their exterior, ones in which he has never set foot.

The conference is being tweeted (or twittered), and I dutifully set out to tweet and be twittered at—to watch the fluttery waves of 160-character commentary. When I began reflecting this morning on Morris’s talk, I had a fantasy that I remembered the title of Blake’s lost work, the one that Morris imagined could be edited in its absence. As I began writing, I discovered that I didn’t. And so I thought—well, there’s Twitter—and so I learned that Twitter too has forgotten, its traces older than eleven hours now consigned to worshipful oblivion—unless retweeted. I’ll have to rediscover memory the old-fashioned way, by shared social context.

Morris said that editors live more in a stated of anxiety or panic than melancholy, and I think I agree. But the appeal of melancholy is strong. Two weeks ago, I visited the Digital Imaging Lab at Kent State to snap pictures of an edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After I finished, I tried to copy the pictures to a hard drive. For some reason, that hard drive only connects to some PCs. And it would not connect to the one in the lab. Therefore, I decided to copy the 15 scans to an SD card. While waiting for it to copy, I had no signal from PC that it was working. So I decided to remove the SD card. Then I was warned that data could be lost. The data was still on the hard drive, and I had to rush to lunch before another class. So I decided to save this transfer for another day. When I contacted a faculty member who runs the lab, she informed me that my pictures, if saved to my user account, would be obliterated when I signed out. So the only evidence that I have is my memory. But I am not melancholy about that. The book that I was taking pictures of is a beautiful edition, with gilt-edge pages. In order to take pictures, I open it. I flatten not so much to damage the spine, but enough to flatten the pages so they are clear. After taking the images now gone, I glanced at the top of the gilt-edge pages, and a line in the gold leaf now appears. As Hanno Biber reminded us, before he began his discussion of the sadness of the digitization of books, this is no sadness as compared with events in Japan. But it is a loss.

I begin to believe that we are more attuned to melancholy as we age. As a literary scholar, we lament works unwritten, manuscripts lost, unique copies burned, the fading of vigorous minds. We lament less the losses of youth, though these are more acute, and Morris did remind us of Thomas Gray’s “mute inglorious Milton.” In one’s 20s or 30s, undone things have the future’s promise. In one’s 60s or 70s, undone things have the promise of never being done. Yet in social terms, when Medicare and Social Security and tenure and pensions are protected, we preserve and protect those marching closer to oblivion, based on society’s solemn obligation, while—at least in my home state of Ohio—we piously burden the current and future generation with higher contributions to retirement, the austerity of cutbacks in social services, higher taxes, higher tuition, school debt, higher levels of unemployment. Can we manufacture a motivating melancholy for the future’s losses? One generation must be protected from tax increases and loss of social services at all costs, another must pay the bill. Can we manufacture melancholy for them—or is youth better served when its seething anger motivates others to fear?

Whitman, during the Civil War, made a pleasure trip to Montauk, out on the edge of Paumanock, which I would be near were we in Manhattan. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Clementine and Joel promise to meet again at Montauk. Clementine’s attempt to reach beyond the oblivion, as the doctors at Lacuna are about to succeed at erasing her from his memory, allows Joel and Clem to reunite, where they can repeat the past, but wiser. Joel’s attempt to hide her in memory, where the Lacuna doctors could never expect her, fails. I fear that digital editorial work is more like the latter, but I hope that it is more like the former.

Senate Bill 5: No union, no committee work?

On the day that the Ohio Senate passed Senate Bill 5, I also received notification from the AAUP that one or more of my colleagues in the English Department at Kent State nominated me to serve as a departmental representative to the union. I had not sought a nomination, but our department is comparatively small. I eventually decided—with advice from my colleagues—that to devote myself to scholarship and teaching at this early stage of my career was more crucial than public service. When early career faculty members are distracted from research and teaching, they risk torpedoing their career. So we keep our nose to the grindstone.

One of the most hated provisions of Senate Bill 5 may have a bright side, because I doubt that the members who wrote the bill have a clear sense of the duties of a member of a university faculty, though this 8 March article in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that I may be wrong in my original inference. The Senate Bill includes the following provision, which seeks to define the duties that would classify one as management-level employee and thus not eligible to be represented by the union.

“Management level employee” means an individual who formulates policy on behalf of the public employer, who responsibly directs the implementation of policy, or who may reasonably be required on behalf of the public employer to assist in the preparation for the conduct of collective negotiations, administer collectively negotiated agreements, or have a major role in personnel administration. [....] With respect to members of a faculty of a state institution of higher education, any faculty who, individually or through a faculty senate or like organization, participate in the governance of the institution, are involved in personnel decisions, selection or review of administrators, planning and use of physical resources, budget preparation, and determination of educational policies related to admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research are management level employees.
(Section 4117.08 K)

Since I serve on departmental committees, one of which is the Graduate Literature Program Subcommittee (GLP-SC), some of my responsibilities including reviewing applications to the KSU doctoral and master’s programs in English literature and to assess or refine programmatic requirement for the degrees. Because members of the committee contribute to decisions related to “admissions” and “curriculum,” by the logic of Senate Bill 5 I have become a “management level employee.” I suppose one could quibble about the meaning of a “like organization,” but I would think a departmental committee is a “like organization.” This leads to a strange quandary. If Senate Bill 5 becomes law, could faculty members remain in the union if they did not serve on committees?

I should inform members of the legislature that a major task of faculty on GLP-SC is to read some 40 or so graduate applications, which consist of 2-page applicant statements, 3 letters of recommendation 20-page writing sample, transcripts, GRE scores. The work is tedious in general but has its rewards. Faculty members do the tedious as “service” even while they enjoy the moments of encountering promising young scholars. The decision of the committee is better than the opinion of a single administrator because different members of the committee bring different expertise. Academic disciplines are broad. Because each member of committee contributes a portion of their expertise, the committee can do a better job of ranking candidates than a single administrator. Sometimes the opinions of committee members are widely divergent, and we have meetings to discuss (that’s fun too).

Members of the university faculty generally do not relish committee work. By reputation, we would prefer to reside in the ivory tower, doing obscure research tasks, like this, instead of teaching or service tasks. Because such work as “admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research” is spread over the membership of committees with rotating membership, the department has a relatively flat administrative staff. Were the state to micro-manage union membership (or worse, to legally prescribe rotating membership according to whether a service-related task was defined as management-level work) I suspect it would subtly undermine a system that generally achieves the goal of responding to changes in the profession and changes in the public expectation for university education with an ordered process. It defies common sense that the legislature would want to be in the business of micromanaging the job description of a university professor.

Do remember that tenured and tenure-track faculty receive little recognition or reward for committee work, because promotion is based mostly on research and teaching. Our faculty peers (again on committees) evaluate us almost exclusively on the basis of the quality of our research (how it is received the field) and our teaching. If you work in the private sector, as I did for about a decade, you know what happens to the little jobs that need to be done, that have no reward associated with doing them, and that can be blamed on others if not done. But in fact, the union strongly encourages the consideration of such service as an essential part of our work. A self-interested faculty member, who knows that research is the most ready path to professional success, would be dumb to devote significant time to committee work. After Senate Bill 5, one would have to border on near idiocy—or suffer from enlightened altruism—to devote one’s self to committee work.

Could an unintended effect of Senate Bill 5 be the end of committee work for faculty members? I doubt it, because the actual purpose is to redefine faculty into management such that faculty could be ordered to fulfill administrative duties. Rather than contributing on the basis of shared interest and dedication to departmental or school governance, committees will probably be appointed, doing committee work as a duty. I can honestly think of no more powerful way to reduce the quality of committee work than by making it compulsory. The naive ask, what would committees possibly do? In addition to the above, hire faculty (though not so much in recent years), alter major requirements to reflect changes in a field or budget, review and approve courses proposed by faculty, request purchases of research books and journals, to name a few.

For example, in a week or two I have to meet to discuss allocations for library purchases for titles related to research in English. Why? Because the library anticipates budget cuts in coming fiscal year, the department’s allocation for library purchases needs to be trimmed. It’s committee work. Does anyone really believe that the university would be better served if an administrator (instead of a faculty committee) made these decision? Should an administrator decide which books to purchase? Or should I and the committee of other members of the faculty make the decision based on their own specialty fields? I’d have a difficult time telling you which books are worth purchasing in linguistics, another part of English department. For nineteenth-century American literature, I can do OK.

For example, in response to state budget cuts, our department (in work by another committee) recently reduced the number of prerequisites for many course, in order to attract students from other disciplines to take our courses for electives. How does department decide which courses could drop pre-requisites? Committee work. Faculty members who had actually taught the courses were much better able to judge which courses could handle open enrollment and which build on previously required courses. And in fact, the decision to change requirements was an administration-driven change. The administration, faced with its own demands trimming budgets, was quite able, with financial incentives and disincentives, to compel the department to re-think its prerequisite requirements.

The members of the Ohio legislature should know that universities are political environments. My department is scheming to attract undergraduates to take our courses, when many might be equally as interested in philosophy or history or journalism or another field. Academics, like other people, respond to incentives and disincentives. When committee work becomes compulsory rather than by service, the public can count on less thorough and conscientious work. There’s a difference between doing the minimum that needs to be done and doing what’s right—did you read each bill in its entirety before you voted on it?—and it is regrettable that the Ohio Senate would systematically encourage the former over the latter in pursuit of its Machiavellian interest in neutering public employee unions. But if the neutered AAUP survives legislative horsetrading, might being a union member become a way to avoid committee work?

The members of the faculty that I know do their best to be conscientious in all of their duties—even committee work. So I doubt that it would suffer considerably. But think about it, members of the legislature, should Senate Bill 5 provide a genuine incentive for lower-quality work on committees composed of the university faculty? But turning faculty into managers, you’re likely to lower the quality of the managerial work that we’re already doing. As you’re political beings, I trust you can figure out whether that’s wise.

This post updated to reflect my decision to decline a nomination to my department’s AAUP representative ballot and to link to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which identifies the source of the Senate language cited above with the Inter-University Council. I had never heard of it before reading this article, but they look a lot like “committee work" for university presidents.

On reading Voltaire’s Candide

While prepping for my Great Books class on the conclusion for Voltaire’s Candide, I stumbled, by way of the Washington Post, onto this Slate article that uses the occasion of a study on college student unhappiness to imply that a significant cause of said unhappiness is social media.

As I’ve found that one way to increase student interest is to suggest that great works of literature offer lessons with regard to social media—I am shamelessly topical even the only social networks of which I am a member are scholarly discussion groups and societies—I plan today to offer Candide’s great advice, “we must cultivate our garden,” as a route to individual happiness.

But social media does not seem to me a useful garden to cultivate. As Facebook was catching on four or five years ago, a student once wrote he had spent 70 hours on the site in the previous two or three weeks. And it occurred to me that anything that could sop up 3 or 4 hours of one’s time every day was a danger to be avoided, a danger to one’s mental health and, for an academic, to one’s professional life. Despite the rumors that saturate public discourse about lazy professors only spending 3 hours a day in the classroom, I work at least 12 hours a day to try to be a good teacher and research scholar. And if I want to do those things well, I just don’t have time to waste 30 minutes per day recording my personal life for public consumption.

There’s no way such a time sink of the self-promotion of social networking could contribute to happiness. Rather than spending time on cool digital technologies—about which I’m obtuse and can’t afford anyway—spend two hours of your life feeding your mind with insights like these from Voltaire.

When the philosopher Pangloss asks the Turkish dervish why man has been created, and Candide points out that there’s a lot of evil in the world, the dervish replies: “When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board or comfortable or not?” (73)

When Candide asks whether men have always been “liars, traitors, ingrates, thieves, weaklings, sneaks, cowards, backbiters, gluttons, drunkards, misers, climbers, killers, calumniators, sensualists, hypocrites, and fools,” Martin (the cynic) responds: “Do you believe … that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they could get them?” (46)

If like for Voltaire’s Turks pistachio sherbet makes you happy, by all means go for it. The trouble with individual happiness as a goal is that it does nothing to address social injustice. I hang with C.S. Pierce, that that any sense of ethics would insist that the seeking for personal happiness cannot shield you from moral responsibility to care for one’s fellows in the joint stock company of civic life.

But Voltaire’s insight about what humans are is the rub. Any social efforts to expand rights, ameliorate pain and suffering, reign in gun lunacy, exercise collective bargaining, or tax the wealthy or highly paid will need to be fought for with righteousness backed by tooth and nail. Because you can expect that others are going to act like human beings. In solidarity with my union brothers and sisters in Ohio, at least until the end of the week, when the hawks plan to munch on some pigeons.

Voltaire. Candide, or, Optimism. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert M. Adams. Trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1991. Print.

Kafkaesque: The OED Definition

Of or relating to the Austrian writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) or his writings; resembling the state of affairs or a state of mind described by Kafka.

If you know Kafka’s work, why would you need a definition?

If you don’t, could the definition help you?

“Kafkaesque.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Ed. 1989. Web.