Meta-blogging

I recently was contacted by Stephen Olsen from the MLA, who is coordinating a pre-conference workshop entitled “Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates” taking place on the 5th of January at this year’s convention. For the session, they are organizing a number of case studies of digital work that they will discuss in terms of how a promotions committee or reviewers would approach them, and my blog was suggested as a possible example.... read more »

The blog in its infancy... read more »

August was quite a month for me personally, precluding any blogging here – moving to Germany and adjusting to life abroad has been my primary occupation (as documented on our family blog). I’m not acclimated enough to understand German television sufficiently to blog about it (although I did learn the word Schnabeltier from my kids watching Phineas und Ferb here).... read more »

Recently, I’ve read, heard & conversed about a range of issues involving the academic job & publication markets, the relative merits of particular topics & approaches to research, and the risks & rewards of making your work-in-progress public. In thinking & talking through these issues, I’ve referenced a number of personal anecdotes and experiences from my still-short career that I thought might be useful to share here for a wider audience in the name of transparency and making the oft-hidden facets of academic life visible.... read more »

It’s been a summer of minimal blogging, what with various family plans, media consumption, and household tasks. I do have a number of posts in the planning stage, and a longer essay drafted that will appear here soon. But yesterday a bit of news arrived that mandated a return to blogging.... read more »

Warning: meandering think piece ahead with minimal coherence or argumentation. Proceed at own risk.... read more »

So thus begins season 6 of Lost. I give “LA X”  two big thumbs up (one in 2004 & one in 2007!), but to read why, you need to go over to Antenna, a newish online venture out of my graduate alma mater, University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Media & Cultural Studies program. The goal of Antenna is to have brief posts by a range of authors on interesting new developments in the world of media, prompting conversations and community. I’ve happily agreed to write about Lost’s final season there, so be sure to subscribe to its feed for many great voices on a range of media.

While that post focuses on issues of narrative and fan expectations, I wanted to offer some additional commentary on how Lost’s ratings successes or failures are being discussed.... read more »

I joined Twitter this past Spring, in large part because I saw the great usefulness of the platform at a conference – I was at MIT6 and surrounded by people having backchannel conversations via Twitter. So I joined on the spot, and spent a few months trying to figure out how it fits my own social media uses.... read more »