My So Called Life

As with the days immediately following 9/11 (with which Katrina will inevitably be narrativized and compared) I’ve spent the last week watching enormous amounts of television coverage. The images are unbearable, but so are the sounds, the voices of people in pain. If there’s good to come out of this let’s hope it means that the pendulum now swings back the other way and some perspective and balance is restored to national policies and a national identity which has been so largely defined by the “War on Terror.” Issues of social justice and, for that matter, civic engineering suddenly have a visibility I cannot imagine they would have achieved any other way.

Here’s what’s gonig on in my own small life.

I’m back in the classroom this semester, teaching an undergraduate honors seminar called Technologies of Literature.

My remaining work on my manuscript will be punctuated by the arrival of two major archival sources, making Mechanisms hopefully a book that breaks some news about electronic literature in addition to contributing to the theoretical debate. What constitutes “major archival sources” in the realm of digital media? Stay tuned. (I’ll also be presenting material from the book at MLA in December.)

Work on the nora project approaches its halfway point. We’ve had a series of successful face to face meetings over the summer, and are optimistic about where we are. Various project members are or will soon be out presenting work, so look for us at a conference near you; I’ll be at Elective Affinities in Philadelphia in September, and the University of Maryland’s The Library in Bits and Bytes symposium. Steve will be at MLA.

I’ve taken on my first ever academic administrative role, as Acting Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). My colleague Neil Fraistat has been appointed MITH’s Acting Director for the academic year, and we are joined by Carl Stahmer, a Visiting Assistant Professor, and likewise Acting Associate Director. Carl’s domain is daily operations, mine is event programming and external relations. All of us are friends, and we’re looking forward to working together. You’ll hear a lot more about MITH here in the months to come, I can promise you.

Lastly, this blog. It badly needs a design overall, and a platform migration (I’m looking hard at Wordpress). Not sure when that will happen though, realistically. In the meantime it suits my basic need for occasional postings, and I thank my (six?) readers for keeping the faith and not taking me off their blogrolls entirely.