• In “Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines for Great Works of Literature,” Emily Temple gives her readers some inspiration in showing you how famous authors planned out their novels (which may inspire you to check out Amy Cavendar’s review of Scapple, a terrific new mindmapping app): “Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over the place, dropping hints and having revelations. So it’s no surprise that many authors plan out their works beforehand, in chart or list or scribble form, in order to keep everything straight. After the jump, you’ll find a mini collection of those planning papers, so you can take a peek into the process of some of your favorite authors, from James Salter to J.K. Rowling.”

• Last weekend, Roopika Risam and I hosted an Open Thread on Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#DHPoco) asking a question inspired by Martha Nell Smith, the founding Director of MITH: “Has the Digital Humanities been a Historical Refuge from Race/Class/Gender/Disability?”: “In 2007, Martha Nell Smith observed: ‘When I first started attending humanities computing conferences in the mid-1990s, I was struck by how many of the presentations remarked, either explicitly or implicitly, that concerns that had taken over so much academic work in literature—of gender, race, class, sexuality—were irrelevant to humanities computing. […]  Scientific matters of mathematics and computation, objective and hard, do not seem to be subject to the concerns of gender, race, or sexuality. 2 + 2, so the reasoning goes, always equals 4, whether you are black, a woman, a queer, a straight, or whatever. HTML, SGML, XML—the codes that make words and images, texts, processable—and TEI conformancy are supposedly gender-, race-, class-neutral. The codes always work, and the principles always apply, whatever one’s personal identity or social group (or so many seemed to believe).’ In your view, how much of this has changed since Smith’s article was published, if anything?” The thread has now generated over 150 comments, which some people have indicated is overwhelming. New readers may thus find our latest lighthearted summary of the thread useful. You are welcome to edit and contribute to the summary by editing the embedded Google document.

• Introducing peer-reviewed research on Facebook! TechCrunch’s Josh Costine tells us, “If subjects like “XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data” get you all worked up, you’ll dig the “Research Publications At Facebook” site, which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. Ranging from hardcore engineering to the sociology of social networks, the library puts Facebook’s open-sourced knowledge all in one place.”

• Launching next week: What Jane Saw, a very interesting digital recreation of Jane Austen’s view of an 1813 art exhibit at the British Institution in Pall Mall, London: “On 24 May 2013, two centuries to the day that Austen viewed the 141 paintings in that exhibit, this site will open its doors as a public e-gallery, offering the modern visitor a precise historical reconstruction of that long-lost Regency blockbuster.”

• It’s been twenty years since Paul Gilroy published his seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, a book which has expanded American studies to Atlantic Ocean studies, particularly with reference to the African Diaspora. Africa in Words is running a series of posts on the book. Check out Nara Improta’s first post, which offers a useful summary and contextualization of the book and its impact: “For Gilroy, the common experience of the Black Atlantic is based on memory. The Black Atlantic is an articulation of the past, rooted in the suffering and in the way people dealt with pain. And for him, the best form of expression of this suffering was music. However, music was more than just a way of transforming pain into pleasure; it was more than a reaction to oppression. It also included an intellectual message. In this sense, Gilroy argues that music should be studied without placing it in a Hegelian hierarchy in which it is seen as a pure form of expression of the soul. On the contrary, he explains that we should not overlook the intellectuality that is part of this form of art. From the syncopated rhythm to the content of the lyrics, for him, Atlantic black music was an intellectual production and should be studied as such, taking into consideration its complexity and seeking to understand its role in social history.”

Finally instead of a video, here’s a DogHouse Diaries comic from Mashable on how technology has made everything (including world domination) something you now do from your computer:

Big Summer Sky Image Credit: Meena Kadri on Wikimedia Commons

Past and Present Comic Credit: DogHouse Diaries on Mashable

First, a major wish-list item of mine has been added to the site: you can now directly link protocols to inventory items. The key here is to think of protocols more broadly than just experiment protocols. In our department, we are using protocols to post introductory lab directions, and now we can associate a given protocol with the inventory records of the equipment used in the lab. This is a key functionality as we have students assist us with set up of labs; the students will be able to easily access information on types and quantities of equipment needed for each week’s labs.

Have you tried out Quartzy’s ordering capabilities yet? You can use the system to log orders, aggregate them, and track as they go through the process of being placed, delivered, and inventoried.  (Quartzy can also compare your to-order item to pricing that the site can secure, and sometimes offer you the same item for less cost – an option that has saved our lab several hundreds of dollars this year.) I personally find this very helpful, working in a small department without a full time lab associate, to keep track of orders among my colleagues for our intro labs. And now, the site can mark received orders in three ways: update the existing item in your inventory (change location/quantity), add the delivered item as a new item to your inventory, or leave your inventory untouched.

Different delivery options for Quartzy.

There are several other updates to the site that are worth taking a look. If you manage a lab, Quartzy can be a good option for making your job easier.

What about you? How do you manage inventory for your work? What other options would you like to see in inventory management systems? Let us know in the comments.

Who the participants were in this particular instance really doesn’t matter, but the incident got me thinking about both the importance of effective communication and some of the difficulties involved in achieving it. Both the attitude we bring to a conversation and the means by which it takes place are vitally important.

In the Twitter conversation mentioned above, the two principal participants were able to work things out in part because there’s already a relationship—one involving mutual liking and respect—between them. They were also willing to accept one another’s explanations of intent, which helped clear up some of the misunderstanding and smoothed ruffled feathers. Both also recognized, I think, some of the difficulties involved in carrying on their discussion in a medium in which posts are limited to 140 characters—a limitation which no doubt contributed to some of the misunderstanding.

What I’m now trying to determine is how best to incorporate ideas about the importance of attitude and medium for good communication into my writing-intensive course in Political Issues this fall. Effective politics requires good communication; conflict is often the result of misunderstanding and/or poor communication. How might I help students identify failures of communication when this is the case? (Not that all conflict necessarily involves misunderstanding. Sometimes there’s conflict because the parties understand one another all too well—as those familiar with the Babel fish will know.)

I’ll also want to work with students to identify what medium might be most effective for communicating the message they want to convey to their intended audience. Is an Op-Ed piece sufficient? A short blog post? Or would a longer piece (whether in print or online), drawing supporting evidence from a variety of  credible sources, be more appropriate?

Helping students identify communications failures and choose an appropriate medium for expressing their ideas may well turn out to be the easier parts of the task, though. The bigger challenge will be to help them develop the attitude of openness that can both aid effective communication and reduce the likelihood of conflict, even if disagreement remains.

In your own experience, what has worked best for helping students to develop open attitudes toward conversation partners and/or to choose the most effective means for expressing their own ideas? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by bonnie-brown]

A mentor of mine suggested a simple hack to prevent such creep: add dedicated blocks of “research time” on your calendar and treat that time as you would any other appointment or class. If treated seriously, this method preserves valuable blocks of time every single week for reading and writing. If your calendar is public (if you use ProfHacker recommendations like Doodle to schedule appointments, for instance), this will prevent others from trying to book you during dedicated research time.

How about you? Do you schedule your research time on your calendar? Do you have other methods for protecting weekly research time? Tell us about your methods in the comments.

I haven’t tried Tumblr yet with my students, but I am playing with it into my own work. As a platform, Tumblr advertises itself as “microblogging” but feels to me like a culture-dedicated version of Facebook, or perhaps a short-form heir to LiveJournal. Writing a Tumblr post feels like less of a commitment than blogging: because the form is based on very viral, often short, content, it feels more like a living notebook where pages can be easily reblogged and annotated from others’ notes. The tags make it relatively easy to move through the entire network of content to find new conversations. There’s sometimes no real sense of copyright or “ownership”, only the originator of a post as it moves through the network. Because of this fluidity and flexibility, I find Tumblr makes a fascinating start as an accessible research journal.

Recently I’ve been working on a project that requires thinking about more texts than I usually try to immerse myself in at any given time. I’ve started using Tumblr to keep track of some of the images and notes for the project and to get ideas from other fans and scholars examining the many versions of Alice in Wonderland.  This can be particularly cool when there are researchers with overlapping interests to follow, like Phantomwise [Down the Rabbit-Hole] Lewis Carroll and all the conversations within.

For researching anything with a popular culture slant, Tumblr is full of discourse: just check out the incredible posts tagged under “fan studies.” There are also academics using it for public research and acts of scholarship in other fields. Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam use Tumblr for sharing and curating articles in #DHPoco: Postcolonial Digital Humanities–including their own comic strip asking provocative questions like “How many postcolonial digital humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?” (Adeline writes more about this and other projects in her Weekend Reading: Race and Global DH post).

Are you on Tumblr? Do you use it as part of your research or scholarly community? Share your experiences in the comments!

[CC BY 2.0 Image by Flickr User Jessaax]

On to this week’s links!

• Katherine Harris takes a sobering look at “An Academic’s Time & Money & Family”: I’ve been contemplating raising a child by myself, but I needed to see what I could realistically handle both financially and mentally.

• Leslie Madsen-Brooks offers a splendid takedown of the the rhetoric of “disruption” around higher ed: I’m no detractor of entrepreneurship; I encourage my public history graduate students to make their own way in the world, and if I wasn’t so busy with my faculty responsibilities, I’d dabble in it myself. But what if, instead of investing so much time, effort and money in start-ups, MOOCs, lecture capture, unwieldy learning management systems, overzealous intellectual property protections and the like, we redoubled our efforts in open access, open learning and open source? These are the efforts that would prove truly disruptive of business-as-usual at the university.

• Designer Frank Chimero spoke with students about “The Nature of Problems,” and offers useful skepticism about technological solutions: It implies that our best idea is to use technology to fix the problems amplified by technology. Should we laugh or cry about this? I’m not saying these approaches won’t work short-term, but long-term, it seems to only exacerbate the issue by asking people to be even more efficient in handling even more quantities of information. That doesn’t seem like a good way forward. Instead, we should try something we can do now, without inventing anything: recalibrate our expectations of one another, and educate each other of the demands placed on us.

• In “All Our Little Lives,” Helena Fitzgerald explains why “Twitter is creepy”: Twitter is a self-curated world of choose-your-own-adventure voyeurism. It becomes interesting when you realize that you can just sit behind the scenes of someone’s life and listen to them talk to themselves, when you realize how many inner monologues — those of friends, celebrities, strangers — are waiting there naked-faced in a neat backward scroll. (Remember, follow me at @jbj!)

• Jonathan Gagné offers a basic “Guide To Developing an App for iOS: It surely helps to have some coding experience, but you don’t have to know about C, C++ or Objective-C coding at first, since a lot of things can be coded with interactive drag-and-drops or options in Xcode. When you need to code something more specific, then Google searches on Objective-C and looking at the existing code in your application can help.

This week’s video looks at the Internet Archive:

Bonus: If you have not yet seen the adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water”, you really should give it 10 minutes.

*Disclosure: Though at the time of this post I have no role in this project, based on this week’s developments it’s fair to assume that will change.

Photo “Sunshine” by Flickr user rkramer62 / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

This week, I’m collecting finals and related work, which is not exactly a favorite assignment, even though (I think) the questions are useful, and the students (usually) are thoughtful. But I’m also sitting in my office and listening to my students recite the poems they’ve memorized over the semester as part of the British literature survey.

In any class where I’ve taught poetry, I have required memorization. It’s taken various forms: I used to require 40 lines, now it’s 20. In some semesters, I’ve had students memorize 14 lines from each period of the survey (so, romantic, Victorian, modernist, and contemporary). I frequently have students hand in a prose “translation” of the poem, along with a brief reflection on the difference between plain speech and poetic. Students have the choice of reciting the poem in class or in my office, and the vast majority sensibly pick the latter. I think it’s a good assignment, and would be willing to defend it on more or less any grounds.

I’d be lying if I said that students particularly enjoy this assignment. Some students skip it; others have explained that they refuse to do it “on principle.” One of my first years teaching, before I understood better how to prep students for it, there were often lines of students–some in tears–outside my office. Not good! More positively, former students have accosted me with bits of their poem years later, because it turns out that poetry sticks in your head.

But the reason it’s my favorite assignment is pretty simple: it’s always fascinating to see the poems students pick. There are students who pick poems that we talked a lot in class, probably because they assume I like those best or because they understand them best. A few will go through an entire anthology to discover the poem with the shortest lines. (Hello, “We Are Seven”!) And then other students pick particular poems because they love them, even when such a choice makes their task more difficult. (For example, most people find free verse harder to remember than poems with regular meter and rhyme.) There are ancillary benefits to the assignment, too: it’s easy to grade, since people either know the poem or they don’t. But fundamentally it’s like a little 90-second window into the student’s engagement with the semester’s material. Plus, pretty much all the poems are great.

So, while it’s arguably a slight assignment, the poem memorization has been one of my favorites over the years. What about you? Do you have an assignment you’re perhaps unreasonably attached to? Let us know in comments!

Photo “A Sober Poetry Reading at Brickbat 14″ by Flickr user typicalgenius / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

Next year, if you could change just one thing under your control, what would it be? Please share in this week’s open thread!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Fabio Penna]

I’ve written a fair amount on AAUP and collective bargaining issues here on ProfHacker, and that will continue. But in this post, I wanted to offer four pointers to anyone contemplating a large servicegovernance commitment of any sort (chair, etc.). Most of these are things I probably should’ve realized four years ago, but, as a great philosopher once said, when I was young and irresponsible I was young and irresponsible.

• Make sure your partner/spouse is on board. Um, I did not do this. Mistakes were made. That is all. (But seriously: Make sure. They need to understand what the commitment is, how it will change your schedule, and possibly his or hers, what you will/won’t be able to discuss, etc. etc. There are a lot of issues.)

• If you have family commitments (kids, parents, relatives for whom you provide care, fill in your own situation here) or expect to, think about how those commitments are likely to change over the course of your term, not just what they are now. For example, four years ago the 9-year-old was in kindergarten in the neighborhood school and played rec soccer. Easy! But then the next year he got moved to a program for advanced readers across town. This year, he split his time between elementary school and middle school, and in the fall even took a college course. And then there’s all the soccer, as he has tended goal for three to six teams a weekend from September to June for the past two years. (There’s even baseball.) Again, a reasonably bright person might have anticipated that a 9yo might have a more ambitious schedule than a 5yo. I am not that person.

• Avoid taking on multiple new commitments until you understand each one. Four years ago I was elected to my first terms as union president, officially taking office on May 1. Seven or eight weeks later, George and I started talking about ProfHacker, which launched that summer. It’s fair to say that I did not yet really understand the demands of the union job based on a sample set drawn from when faculty were mostly off campus. And it’s also fair to say that George and I had no idea that our little blog idea would one day end up at the Chronicle.

• Make sure you know what you are actually getting into. The daily work of most jobs is probably a little different from what one imagines. Being clear-eyed about that going in is a useful thing. (Ideally, this would be a part of that self-replacement process I mentioned above, but that doesn’t’ always work out.)

None of which is to imply you shouldn’t take on big governance roles! It is important work, and is closer to the heart of of what makes colleges and universities distinctive–and in good ways!–than we usually recognize. But is also work that probably changes your schedule and your relationship to campus in ways that are hard to predict.

Photo “All finished! by Flickr user Will Clayton / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

I suppose I could have gone to the local office supply store and purchased several large sheets of newsprint, but the later part of April happened to be when the team at Literature and Latte released Scapple.

Scapple is a completely free-form editor that lets you get ideas down quickly, move them around (or not), and make connections between them (or not). In short, you can place any item anywhere on the page that you like, and connect it to any other item—or just leave it to stand by itself.

It’s a great tool for mindmapping, though it’s not limited to that. It was certainly ideal for my purposes. I downloaded the trial version, installed it, and had the basics figured out in about two minutes. I was able to sketch out what I needed really quickly, and much faster than I could have done it by hand. It’s also possible to export a Scapple file as a PDF or PNG file, which made it incredibly easy for me to include my sketch in my presentation to the class.

Those who use Scrivener (which has received just a few mentions in this space) will appreciate the fact that the two applications play well together; notes can be dragged from Scapple directly into Scrivener.

I usually play around with software for quite a while before making a purchasing decision, but it only took a couple of hours to decide that, for me, Scapple was worth the price of the license (it’s a reasonable $14.99, and academic pricing is available).

The only downside (and this is not a dig at Literature and Latte; they’re a small outfit and just can’t do everything all at once) is that, unlike Scrivener, Scapple is only available for the Mac. So, while we’d love to hear your impressions about Scapple, we’d also be very interested in hearing from Windows and Linux users who’ve found something that works well for them to accomplish similar tasks. If you’ve got suggestions, please share them in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by the author.]