A Baylor/Redeemer Pres. friend of mine is blogging about her experiences as a female PhD student (sociology) spending the summer in Saudi Arabia. It’s really interesting reading, you should check it out.

I’m safely back in Texas after a week at home and a week doing nothing (in the best possible way) in Minnesota; classes start back up tomorrow, and while I’m not really ready to start writing papers again, I realized yesterday that I won’t be in the newbie group anymore and I’ll get to meet some new people entering the program this year. So that should be fun. Trying to get the rest of my books at the bookstore tomorrow along with 10,000 other students probably won’t be, though. Ah, well.

Some of you may have gotten incoming links or trackbacks from jandysmeanderings.the-frame.com today; in case you did, don’t panic or change your links yet. I’m working on replacing the site that was at www.the-frame.com (which I hadn’t updated for like two years) with something a bit more up-to-date, but it may involve moving this blog–I was testing the exporting/importing function today. It may move to the jandysmeanderings subdomain, or I may just put it at the base www.the-frame.com URL. I’m still playing with my host and figuring out what’s going to work the best. Not to mention playing with WordPress themes to find something I can use as a CMS (as opposed to something that looks like a blog). I found one I like a lot, but trying to modify the code to let me center the whole layout–it’s left-justified now, which I think looks stupid–stymied me. Anyone conversant enough in CSS and PHP to help me fix it?

It’s always dangerous to advertise upcoming posts because I run the risk of not following through, but do expect June’s book and movie recap within the next day or two, and a rundown of what looks interesting on the fall TV schedule. Plus SYTYCD videos, and maybe some excerpts from the Australian Idol auditions. I’m not even kidding when I emphasize how different (and probably better) Australian Idol is going to be from American Idol this year–in the first audition episode, ALL of the contestants sent on to Sydney were singer-songwriter types; not a typical pop voice among them. I’ll get back into doing Music Mondays one of these weeks, but it may not be this week. I haven’t had time (or broadband access) to check out any new music lately; if I did Music Monday this week, it would probably be All Beatles All The Time, since I listened to them almost nonstop both on the way to St. Louis and on the way home.

I apologize for the lack of blogging going on around here, especially for the lack of the SYTYCD recaps-with-video. I’ve been home for a couple of weeks between school terms, which leads to less blogging anyway (due to the lack of need for procrastination tools), plus my computer was in the shop for a few days getting a cooling problem fixed and getting various upgrades (yay!). And this week, I’m in Minnesota getting my fill of cool weather and relaxation–with a dial-up connection. So, yeah. I’m going to be MIA for another week, but then I will try to get back into the groove once school starts.

My only SYTYCD note for tonight (though I am watching at least tonight’s, and hopefully the finale tomorrow): I STILL MISS SARA LIKE WHOA. Although, I’m okay with Lacey and Sabra in the final four; I just wish Sara had beaten Lauren. I will put up the video of the routines up when I have a broadband connection again.

Some of you may already have noticed that I have put a “Shared Items” widget in my sidebar; basically what it does is show my “shared posts” from Google Reader, which I’m currently using as my RSS feed reader. These are articles or posts that I came across in my subscriptions that I thought were interesting. If I find something really interesting or that I have any comments about, I’ll still make a separate post in the shorts section (or the main blog if, you know, I have a LOT of comments), but I thought this might be a way to share a little bit of my feed-reading activities with the rest of y’all.

Also, I just added the ability to subscribe to comments via e-mail on every post. Now there’s a check box below the comment box on every post asking if you want to subscribe to the comments. If you check it (whether or not you leave a comment), you will get subsequent comments e-mailed to you. This can be helpful if you want to know whether I’ve replied to you without checking the post constantly (I try to reply promptly, but I’m not always as good about it as I should be), or if you’re interested to see if anyone else comments and what they say. You can also do this by using a comments tracker like co.mments (which you can easily do using the “track and bookmark” icon on each post), but more ways to do things is usually good.

Finally, I’m sorry I haven’t updated the music player in FOREVER. The plugin I use for it is a little unwieldy when it comes to updating the playlist…I’ve been looking for another option and haven’t been successful yet. I’m going to try to have a little more fun with music, though, by offering a few tracks each week that I’m either really into or have found recently on mp3blogs. I shall call this…Music Monday. Because alliteration is fun. I shall also try to post the Trailer Watch on Thursdays so I can call it….Trailer Thursday! I thought about doing Tech Tuesday, but if I held tech news over for up to a week, it would be old by the time I posted it–tech news ages reaaally quickly on the internets. And I want do so some sort of recurring Film Guide thing, showcasing specific directors or genres or movements and stuff, but to keep with the alliteration that would have to be Film Friday, and I’m not sure I can guarantee to get that done before the weekend; at least, not with the level of quality I’d hope to achieve. Anyway, it’s dangerous to say things about what I’m planning to do, because then I look like a doofus if I don’t do it. That’s part of why I’m doing it, though…maybe the fear of being a doofus will motivate me to actually follow through on these planned postings. So hold me to it, people.

Oh, and also, Abby and Jennifer tagged me for the “7 Things You Might Not Know About Me” meme…I’m working on it, I swear. I’ve just only thought of five things so far that people probably wouldn’t know about me. When I think of two more, I’ll post it.

I think this is a great idea. Dave at academhack lays out the way he’s using a blog to help students refine their paper topics through peer discussion. That’s only one of the applications blogs could have for a classroom, though. He briefly mentions posting syllabi, assignments, updates, links, etc. True, there is software in schools that do some of this stuff–we use Blackboard, and he also mentions one called WebCT, which I don’t know about, but let me tell you something. Blackboard is crap, man. I hate it. It’s not intuitive (is the syllabus under “assignments” or “class documents”? What about assigned readings?), only the teacher can update it (with things like the link I e-mailed my teacher upon her request a month ago and still isn’t up), it’s fugly, and it’s just…very institutional. I know, I know, part of my resistance to Blackboard is my innate rebellion against whatever the school (or business, or whatever) provides, but part of it is also that it’s crap.

Another good application of blogs, similar to the one Dave talks about, is a reading-journal type thing. Last semester I had a class with an e-mail reading journal, which was basically “write a couple of paragraphs about each assigned reading and e-mail them to the teacher.” I loved doing this, because I love writing about what I’m reading, especially in less-formal-than-an-essay ways. The only thing that would’ve made it better is more interaction between students–a way to read and respond to other students’ written thoughts and get feedback on your own. I suppose the downside would be that not every student would feel comfortable sharing their thoughts with the whole class (I wouldn’t have in college, a lot of the time), and I’d want to figure out a way to accommodate that (or overcome it), but for those who did want to continue the discussion further, it would be outstanding. I’m torn on this, really, because I have always hated peer-review sessions; for some reason, teachers threaten me less than peers. But I think in written format, I’d have been fine. I’m sure there are other students like me who shy away from speaking in class, but might blossom if given less threatening ways to interact.

If I were going to teach ever, I’d have blogs and wikis all over the place. This sort of thing really excites me. I wish there were a way I could teach without the whole, you know, having to teach part. I would explain my feelings on teaching better if they were clear to me, but they’re not, so I can’t.

Mark responded to my post on blogging and 18th century periodicals in a couple of places.

After quoting the near-last paragraph of my post, arguing that the major difference between 18th century periodicals and blogging is the low barrier to entry that blogging exhibits, he says:

While I agree with this in principle, it does seem to me that the low “barrier to entry” means that intellectual and literary communities can no longer form the way they once did. The blogosphere doesn’t allow for what the system of periodicals promoted.

I do acknowledge, as he later points out, that “publishing and circulating journals required money and tools” in the 18th century that blogging really doesn’t today. But I do also think that the blogosphere does actually allow intellectual and literary communities to form. The difference is that instead of the guy with the money and the printing press calling the shots, the guy with the good idea and the ability to lead a community gets to call the shots. The difference is that everybody doesn’t have to be at the same academic level to join in. The difference is that people don’t have to be the in the same location to participate. The communities that are forming are larger, broader, and more inclusive than they were. Some might say that’s not a good thing, but I think it is. Some will say that’s not even true, that internet communities quickly get insular, exclusive, and elitist. That can also be true, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s a danger with any community, or any journal, or any periodical that isn’t managed well…it’s more noticable in the blogosphere, because it’s on a much larger scale.

An example that I bring up not because it’s perfect (I don’t even follow it that closely), but because it’s the closest thing that popped into my head: The Valve. It’s a group blog for literary scholars/theorists. Most of what I read on it is quite good. I admit that I spend more energy following a few of the contributors’ individual blogs than reading The Valve, but that’s because it has been sort of theoretical lately and it goes over my head. And that’s a point I want to make. The Valve has specific contributors, invited to participate by those already contributing. So in a way, it is a modded journal, but a very informal one. The contributors range from professors, assistant professors, and associate professors to graduate students and independent scholars, and from California to Washington to New York to London to Singapore. Anyone can comment. But the level of discourse is so generally high that anyone who isn’t interested in literary criticism probably wouldn’t stick around long enough to be a nuisance. So they have formed an intellectual and literary community that’s rigorous and yet open-access.

So I wouldn’t at all say that the blogosphere prohibits the formation of intellectual and literary communities. As I said in my earlier post, the percentage of viable intellectual and literary communities (as opposed to dross and dreck) is lower than it was in the 18th century, but they’re still there, and not fundamentally different than the 18th century periodicals.

Mark also says:

There is no peer review beyond people telling you what they think of what your wrote.

This is getting into a whole other can of worms, especially in an academic context where being published in peer-reviewed journals means getting tenure or not. In the John Holbo article I linked in my earlier post, he mentions this exact thing (Mark may have seen this, I’m not sure), and accepts it as possibly a good development in scholarly publishing, which is sort of tanking right now. I’m sort of disenamored with scholarly publishing at the moment and am defiantly refusing to even participate in it (alternately, I haven’t been able to write anything worth publishing), and I prefer Holbo’s more open-access, post-publishing peer-review idea. Here’s the link to his (.pdf) article again.

And a final quote from Mark:

The sheer pace expected by the medium is probably conducive to carelessness and second-rate work.

I also agree with that. But who says we have to obey expectations? I used to resist commenting on older entries, because hey. The blogosphere moved on without me, right? But you know, it doesn’t. It’s still there. It may be archived off the main page, but it’s still there–and as long as the blogger doesn’t delete the post, and the server doesn’t crash and lose all the data, it’ll stay there, and I’m going to consider it fair game. Who says we have to respond immediately? See how I waited almost a week to respond to Mark, and he didn’t post for ten days after my original post? And my original post was like, two or three weeks after the post on Bitch, P.D. that inspired it? That was time for reflection. Yep. Not at all laziness. Or forgetfulness. Nope. Considered reflection. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Now, comments are harder to keep up with in the ’sphere, especially on self-hosted blogs like Mark and I have–the blog owners get notified when there are new comments, but commenters don’t get notified if their comment gets answered or if someone else comments. There are a few solutions to this (here’s where I try to provide tech advice). One, find an RSS feed for comments–some sites provide them, some don’t. Mark’s does, at the bottom of each entry. I’m sure mine has a comments feed, because all WordPress blogs do, but I’m not sure where it is. My bad; I’ll look into that. Then you can subscribe to comments just like you subscribe to the main feed. Or you can use a comment tracking service. One of the big ones is CoComment–if you use Firefox, there’s even a CoComment extension you can use, and it’ll give you the option to track any post you comment on. I haven’t had a lot of luck with CoComment, for some reason, so I’ve been using co.mments. No extension, which is kind of a bummer, but you can put a bookmarklet in your favorites bar for it, and just click that whenever you’re on a post you want to track. Then you can see all the posts you’re tracking on the co.mments site, or subscribe to a single co.mments RSS feed. I really prefer that to subscribing to individual post’s comments, anyway. (If you notice the little icons below each of my posts that say “track and bookmark,” the left one is for co.mments. So, you know, if you wanted to track responses to any of my posts using co.mments, you wouldn’t even need the bookmarklet. Just sayin’. You’d still need to sign up for a free account, though, I think.)

The reason I pointed out all of that is that I think a lot of times people hesitate to comment on older posts because they think the conversation is over and done with, and they’re too late to the party. And I don’t think that has to be the case, and the more we use tools like CoComment or co.mments, the more we can extend conversations over time, and not get caught up in the breathtaking speed the blogosphere sometimes wants to go. The other thing you can do is post on your own blog and use trackbacks instead of commenting, especially if your comment gets long, or you have other tangentially-related things you want to say (i.e., how to track blog comments). A trackback is basically a link back to the blog you’re referring to, or quoting from. Some blogging software will recognize trackbacks from just a regular link to the entry URL. Other software has specific trackback links–look for these if you’re going to comment in your own blog about another post, and if you see a link that says “trackback link” or something like that, use that link instead of the entry URL. That way, the original poster gets notified that you’ve posted, and sometimes the trackback will get posted sort of like a comment to their entry, allowing their readers to find your blog as well. Links are like currency. Use them prodigally.

Well, that was fun. Now back to Langston Hughes (who’s great, by the way…I’ll post about him later, if I don’t get completely sick of him by the time I turn in the paper about him on Wednesday).

Occasioned by this post over at Mumblety-Peg (especially the comment that blogging is a poor medium for expressing ideas), and encouraged by the many dozens of pages I’ve been reading in 18th-century literary and aesthetic culture (for a paper I should be writing now instead of this), a few thoughts on blogging as a continuation of 18th-century periodicals. With the caveat that I am nowhere near an expert on 18th-century periodicals.

The 18th-century really saw the beginning of what we now call magazines, in the form of journals published periodically by the members of various literary circles. The most well-remembered periodicals of the day are Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator, Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, and Steele’s The Tatler, but there were many, many others–often by a group of friends, but sometimes by individuals. These periodicals concerned themselves with contemporary politics, culture, literature, and personalities, and took the various forms of essays, opinion pieces, reviews, satires, and personal narratives. And many of the essays were published anonymously or pseudonymously. In fact, a good bit of scholarly work in this area has been done simply trying to ascertain who wrote various anonymous reviews in these periodicals.

The periodicals at this time also introduced the now-ubiquitous “letter to the editor,” giving anyone and everyone the chance to respond to the published essays. Later issues might respond back to letters to the editor–in fact, sometimes the letters were actually written pseudonymously by the publication’s authors! In addition to this direct conversation with readers, the periodicals were in constant conversation with each other, publishing essays that responded to essays in other, often opposing periodicals. Sometimes individuals used periodicals to carry on debates in an open-letter format.

I would submit, along with many academics specializing in 18th-century literature, that blogging today is not qualitatively different than the 18th-century periodical culture. You have nearly personal publishing by individuals or small groups. You have readers with the ability to respond, either directly via comments or indirectly via trackbacks to their own blogs, and writers (usually) willing to return responses. You have interaction between different publishers/writers. You have coverage of any topic under the sun. You have the possibility for anonymity/pseudonymity. The difference between blogs and 18th-century periodicals seems to me to be almost entirely quantitative rather than qualitative–the barrier of entry is much lower, which does lower the signal to noise ratio, I’ll certainly grant you that. But though blogging’s open-access, open-ended format may encourage bad behavior and low-quality self-expression, it doesn’t necessarily mean that blogging can’t be an extremely useful tool when these very same qualities are used well.

Just think, the Joseph Addison of the 21st century could be blogging right now, and 200 years from now, academics will be placing his (or her!) blog alongside The Spectator in the periodical canon.

Note: A lot of this post (okay, most of this post) is based on a post made by the psuedonymous academic of BitchPhD; it’s basically a reprinting of a paper she presented at the MLA Conference this year, specifically about the connections between pseudonymity in the 18th-century periodicals and in blogging.

See also: John Holbo’s posting about his MLA paper from the same panel. A draft .pdf of his paper “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine” (an ambitious and exciting view of what academic blogging could be) is here.