Month: August 2010

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Technology postcards, which are exciting to me (but probably not to you) because I made them!

Here’s something kind of silly: a set of postcards I made for Yale’s Instructional Technology Group to advertise the Teaching with Technology Tuesdays series of workshops on technology and pedagogy. Each one is an image of older reading technology, which I have improved and modernized!

This was a really fun project for me because it was my first time using Photoshop for anything other than cropping and autobalancing photos. Basically, I watched about 20 hours of Lynda.com videos. (Pretend you didn’t read that, dissertation advisers.) OK, yes, there may be some issues with perspective, but, whatever, I made them and therefore think they are brilliant. Continue reading “Technology postcards, which are exciting to me (but probably not to you) because I made them!”

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So, you’re moving to New Haven: what to do

Surprisingly, this is one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. I wish you the very best of luck on your move, but I regret that I don’t have time to answer individual questions about your situation.

(This is Part II in a series of posts about living in New Haven. Look for more, unless I get tired of doing them.)

I first moved to New Haven from the Bay Area, and well do I remember driving up and down Dixwell and Whalley, wondering where the hell the kids were in this town. There are plenty of young adults, don’t get me wrong, but the whole blue-blazered, drinking-at-Mory’s thing was not my scene (and still, thankfully, is not). I must tell you, New Haven Transplant, that there is a lot of that in your new home. And maybe you’re into that! In which case, go nuts!

For the rest of us, though, there are a few hidden gems, and you should find them so you don’t become bitter and angry.

Continue reading “So, you’re moving to New Haven: what to do”

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Everybody must get spammed!

If you tried to leave a comment and got spammed, it’s because you’re a cylon. Just kidding, it’s nothing personal. I’m trying to fix the settings, but I’m having trouble. Send me an email to let me know, or just hang on, and I’ll keep monitoring my spam folder.

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How to ask questions at academic presentations without being a jerk

OK, let me just start by saying that I have been That Guy (in a gender-neutral sense) many, many times. You know what I mean? The one who asks a question that makes you surreptitiously elbow the person next to you or doodle “WTF?” on your notepad. It’s hard! There are so many ways to be obnoxious at an academic presentation! Especially for those of us with egos (not me, of course — I’m just being helpful), the temptation to grandstand can be overwhelming.

Thus! I am compiling this list of dos and don’ts so that I, more than anyone else, will remember to do them and don’t them. Are there some I’m missing?

Continue reading “How to ask questions at academic presentations without being a jerk”

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What I learned from the Scholars’ Lab and the Center for History and New Media

"Embroidered Digital Commons," by Bethany Nowviskie

A big part of my new job at Emory is researching models of digital scholarship. The idea is that by getting a sense of what’s out there, Emory can benefit from others’ experience when it launches its own center for digital scholarship. So my colleague, Stewart Varner, and I have been going on field trips to centers whose work we admire.

So far we’ve hit the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab and George Mason’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). Next up is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. (Before I got to Emory, staff members visited Duke’s Visual Studies Initiative and the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities.)

Staff at both CHNM and the Scholars’ Lab were unbelievably generous with their time and expertise. Really. One of the things that’s drawn me to the digital humanities is its practitioners’ intellectual generosity, and the people we met confirmed that impression tenfold.

Stewart and I expected to be impressed by the Scholars’ Lab and CHNM, and we were — specifically, we were impressed by the smart, thoughtful, creative people we met. We were surprised, though, by how deeply the visits affected our own thinking about the kind of center we want to build at Emory. Here’s my attempt to capture what I took away from our trips. Continue reading “What I learned from the Scholars’ Lab and the Center for History and New Media”