Data Deluge
Monday, 8 March 2010 at 4:56 PM Picked up a copy of The Economist in the airport last week. I love this image.
Monday, 8 March 2010 at 4:56 PM Picked up a copy of The Economist in the airport last week. I love this image.
Sunday, 7 March 2010 at 3:18 PM I have started reading a new book, online, that explores the future of academic publishing. I'm predisposed to like it because it has made a bold experiment in this direction, opening itself to public review. From the introduction:
One of the points that this text argues hardest about is the need to reform peer review for the digital age, insisting that peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open. And so here’s the text, practicing what it preaches, available online for open review.
Take a look at Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence. For the right project, I'd like to try working like this myself. I wonder, though: Could someone do a PhD like this? Or is it better as a post-tenure project?
(Hat-tip: AJ.)
It turns out that Kathleen Fitzpatrick teaches at Pomona College, and was a colleague of the late David Foster Wallace. And she has taught a course on DFW, with a blog. There's also a very fine memorial, which rings the changes on some of my favorite essays. It has some splendid anecdotes, too, like this:
These students, from across his career, tell strikingly similar stories about the effects he had on them, both as writers and as people. Sometimes those effects were produced in surprising ways: a student from his days at Amherst noted, “I used to confuse further and farther, and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I’d confused them yet again, and in the margins, he’d written, simply, ‘I hate you.’ I’ve never confused them since.”
As a reader I still miss that guy.
Tuesday, 2 March 2010 at 12:42 PM Looks interesting. Wish I were closer. Here are programme notes.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010 at 10:20 AM I am giving up making adjustments to this website's design for Lent. Seriously. Which means we are stuck with the font choices I made on Shrove Tuesday for the next season of the liturgical year. Presumably this doesn't matter to you at all.
Still, it was annoying to log on to an old PC this morning and see how poor the fonts looked. This is not a unique problem. As the NY Times reports, at a whole different level, Typeface Designers Wrestle With the World of Pixels. Maybe I'll have to switch back to reliably plain vanilla Georgia, though of course that'll have to wait now.
Thursday, 11 February 2010 at 6:04 PM Andrew Chignell's well-considered analysis of Wheaton's prospects — based on a sympathetic but critical look back at outgoing president Duane Litfin's 17-year tenure — has generated loads of chatter, from Facebook to the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Wheaton is my alma mater, too, so I read with great interest. Alarmingly, the piece was twice pulled from publication in Books and Culture by its parent magazine Christianity Today. The SoMA Review finally carried it last month, and the author has a website pulling the story and backstory together: if you haven't yet, read all of and about Whither Wheaton? The Flagship Charts a New Course.
Yesterday I was told that Wheaton's new president had been announced. The name: Dr. Ryken. "As in Lee of the English deptartment?" I asked, surprised. They thought so.
We've been traveling, without much access to the internet, so I wasn't able to confirm until now. A Dr. Ryken has been announced, but not quite the one I have enjoyed imagining in that role. (If you know him and have not already done so, cherish that thought for a moment.) I guess the Wheaton of the Liberated Imagimation was not to be. We shall see what will.
And there's this:
Congregational Meeting - 2-21-2010 from Tenth Presbyterian Church on Vimeo.