Over the last couple of months, I opened Generous Thinking to a community review process at Humanities Commons. I am thrilled with how the discussion went and am thoroughly enjoying the process of revision started.
Doing that work has had me reflecting a fair bit of late on my working processes, how they’ve changed over the last several years, and how I might want to transform them yet again. And one bit of that potential transformation is leading me, with Dan Cohen, back to blogging, and, with Alan Jacobs, to ponder returning to some related technologies as well.
Reads, Listens
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
👓 In Revision | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Yesterday morning, I closed comments on the open review of Generous Thinking. I’m enormously grateful to everyone who took the time to read and give me feedback on the project: 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). I have a good bit of insight into what’s working well and what needs improvement in the manuscript, and I’m excited about the possibilities ahead as I embark on the revision process.
👓 Community Review | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
In my last book, Planned Obsolescence, I argued for the potentials of open, peer-to-peer review as a means of shedding some light on the otherwise often hidden processes of scholarly communication, enabling scholars to treat the process of review less as a mode of gatekeeping than as a formative moment in which they could learn from and contribute to their communities of practice. In Generous Thinking, my focus is somewhat different—less on the ways that scholars communicate with one another and more on the ways we invite the world into our work—but the emphasis on opening up our processes and imagining the ways that they might invite new kinds of conversations remains.
👓 Building a Community | THE OU CREATIES
*This site was put together for sharing during a presentation at WPCampus 18. I hope the site provides the same narrative as what I presented, but you can also watch the recorded feed or download this rather large pdf of my presentation from the conference. The great challenge of educational technol...
👓 WP Campus 18 First Notes | John Stewart
This week, I’m attending WP Campus 18 in St. Louis, MO. For the conference, presenters are encouraged to create some sort of online artifact (usually a WP site) to share their slides and resources. Here’s mine.
👓 Why Not Blog? | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
My friend Alan Jacobs, a key inspiration in my return (such as it is, so far) to blogging and RSS and a generally pre-Twitter/Facebook outlook on the scholarly internet, is pondering the relationship between blogging and other forms of academic writing in thinking about his next project. Perhaps needless to say, this is something I’m considering as well, and I’m right there with him in most regards.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
The blog was not just the venue in which I started putting together the ideas that became my second book, the one that made promotion and various subsequent jobs possible, but it was also the way that I was able to demonstrate that there might be a readership for that second book, without which it’s much less likely that a press would have been interested. ❧
This sounds like she’s used her blog as both a commonplace book as well as an author platform.
In fact blog posts are not the kind of thing one can detail on one’s annual review form, and even a blog in the aggregate doesn’t have a place in which it’s easy to be claimed as a site of ongoing scholarly productivity. ❧
Mine have gone more like (1) having some vague annoying idea with a small i; (b) writing multiple blog posts thinking about things related to that idea; (iii) giving a talk somewhere fulminating about some other thing entirely; (4) wondering if maybe there are connections among those things; (e) holy carp, if I lay the things I’ve been noodling about over the last year and a half out in this fashion, it could be argued that I am in the middle of writing a book! ❧
Here’s another person talking about blogs as “thought spaces” the same way that old school bloggers like Dave Winer and Om Malik amongst many others have in the past. While I’m thinking about it I believe that Colin Walker and Colin Devroe have used this sort of idea as well.
🎧 Episode 335: Kind Of A Challenge For Newcomers | Core Intuition
Daniel and Manton catch up after traveling to Chicago and Portland, respectively. Manton reflects on the IndieWeb Summit and the inspiration he took away from that event. They talk about learning to balance “business emergencies” with other obligations, and other indie business skills. Finally, they respond to Apple’s new Maps announcements, and whether Apple’s stance on privacy is an excuse for poor user experiences. Links:
- IndieWeb Summit – The Portland-based unConference that Manton attended recently.
- IndieAuth for Micro.blog – Manton’s blog post about adding support for IndieAuth to the service.
- IndieWeb Wrap-Up – Manton’s blog post looking back on his time at the IndieWeb Summit.
- Micro.blog Slack – Sign-up form for the Micro.blog community Slack team.
- PostStatus.com – A community of WordPress professionals.
- WordCamp Boston – A WordPress-oriented unConference in Boston starting July 21.
- Prompt – Panic’s SSH client for iOS.
- Apple is Rebuilding Maps – Exclusive by Matthew Panzarino for TechCrunch.
- Google Maps’s Moat – Justin O’Beirne’s analysis of Google Maps’s technological advantages.
- Resources up the Yang – Matthew Panzarino joins John Gruber on The Talk Show.
🎧 Episode 336: Bringing Webrings Back | Core Intuition
Manton and Daniel talk about migrating Manton.org to run on Micro.blog. They reflect on the nostalgia and inspiration of old web conventions like webrings and blogrolls. Finally, they talk about macOS Mojave’s forthcoming AppleEvent sandboxing and the effect it has on a wide variety of apps.
👓 HrefHunt! | Kicks Condor
I asked you for links! And maybe five people said, Hey, sure. (Who doesn’t want a link to them??) I also hit up Hacker News. And that went better. I don’t really see any of these links as being outside of my filter bubble—might need to crawl Neocities next! But hey. It’s great! I wanted to p...
Even more, I love the old-school web meets new-school on this particular website.
👓 Let Me Link to You | Kicks Condor
So wait. Where are you? I guess I’m caught in my filter bubble again. After #DeleteFacebook, maybe you went back to your bicycle and your Polaroid camera. But maybe you’re out there still...
👓 How Online Hobbyists Can Reaffirm Your Faith in the Internet | New York Times
Much of the internet feels terrible. But using the web to learn an offline hobby can give you a glimpse of a healthier relationship with your digital devices.
👓 Michiko Kakutani on Her Essential New Book 'The Death of Truth' | Rolling Stone
With a series of brilliant essays, the legendary book critic has crafted the first great piece of literature on the Trump administration
👓 This Snail Goes Through Metamorphosis. Then It Never Has to Eat Again. | New York Times
The transformation of a deep sea mollusk is comparable to an average person growing as much as 60 feet tall with a giant sac of bacteria filling its guts.
👓 Oldest extract of Homer’s Odyssey found | BBC
Found near an Ancient Greek temple in Olympia, the tablet has been dated to Roman times.
👓 Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, and other lies of physics | Aeon
After spending billions trying (and failing) to support beautiful ideas in physics, is it time to let evidence lead the way?