I was very pleased to join Dan Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, Mills Kelly, and (for the first time!) Amanda French for Episode 69 of Digital Campus: “Strange Bedfellows.”
I am very flattered by the number of congratulations I’ve received on and offline for the publication of my book, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. (University of Illinois Press). Many have even pre-ordered it, and I fully intend to reimburse anyone who does that by buying them beer. But I must point out that the book is not actually out. When I try to click through and order a copy, it tells me that it won’t be available until the first week of December.
I don’t know how accurate that is (it’s the first time I’ve read an actual release date). I can say that the book is very close to being ready for the printer.
But now that it has been revealed, I want to take this opportunity to point out how amazing the cover is. I didn’t have any brilliant suggestions to make about cover art (I’m kind of a text guy), and so I just left it to the design department at Illinois. They hired a brilliant designer named Alex de Armond (http://www.alexdearmond.com/) who created the image by layering blank pages from Google Books, thus creating a texture somewhat like the layers of an onion skin. The thumb, of course, is one of the infamous artifacts from the Google Books scanning process. I am so very, very glad that I left this decision to others. I think it’s fantastic.
And really, why not judge a book by its cover?
This past term I gave a graduate course, in collaboration with Jeff Trzeciak, on “Technologies of Communication” and tried something that feels a bit subversive: I didn’t assign any essays. Of course, I’m almost certainly not the first humanities professor to not assign essays in a graduate course (I haven’t bothered looking for other examples though one could check the syllabus finder), but it still it still goes against the grain of all my own experiences as a student and challenges what I take to be one of the most common practices of assessment in the humanities.
My reasoning was that students would probably only gain a slight incremental benefit from writing Yet Another Essay (even if we all benefit from every instance of writing and receiving feedback, no matter where we are in our careers). However, if I could formulate some assessment modules that encouraged students to express themselves with unconventional technologies – and, crucially, think about the process of formulating their ideas and arguments with the constraints and affordances of those technologies – then that experience would be much more valuable to them. Besides, I tend to like experimenting with pedagogy and don’t need much of an excuse do so.
