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Is Some of the Magic Lost?  well, that was the question I asked in my MA Dissertation in 2009.  As I prepare for the keynote at JISC's HE Conference at Leeds University, I find myself revisiting a lot of the influences and elements of my own ...

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I was recently involved in an interesting discussion with the Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program in Regenerative Medicine regarding ethical challenges in stem cell biology, particularly relating to patient approval for using surgical waste in research. Specifically, it is now possible … Continue reading →

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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This is a test post for my new blog. It will be used primarily for participation in discussions surrounding graduate education and interdisciplinary research for the Future Professoriate Certificate Program and the IGEP in Regenerative Medicine. Thanks...

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My have mainly moved over to Tumblr – easier platform and, perhaps, more appropriate to my work. My tumblr – http://bigshuggie.tumblr.com – simply notes the pictures (and other things) I have found that interest me. So drop over and have a … Continue reading →

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My have mainly moved over to Tumblr – easier platform and, perhaps, more appropriate to my work. My tumblr – http://bigshuggie.tumblr.com – simply notes the pictures (and other things) I have found that interest me. So drop over and have a … Continue reading →

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Reblogged from the Connected Learning Research Network It has been almost a year since the release of the connected learning principles in March 2012 on connectedlearning.tv. For those of us who are part of the Connected Learning Research Network, t...

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I am verry excited to see so many people who joined my online class( more than 700 registered to attend ) . Like I promise you you can download the presentation,join Curation Google Plus Community https://plus.google.com/communities/100188349857613823793 and like https://www.facebook.com/
CurationRestartEducationProject .#co13 Top 10 startup social media curation tools for Social learning in the workplace that will change research in XXI Century Education by @LucianeCurator


Here is the recording of my session .





Thanks Dr. Nellie Deutsch because you offer me embed code for my session . Dear friends after the session I invite you all to see / download my presentation here on my blog  and still then click on screen capture .


Dear efront eLearning team thank you because you selected me in top 5 finalists articles and now Ipad Winner in your Competition after 3 weeks of sharing / comments for our guest posts . Now I want to thank you to all my friends because with your help I have more than 400 shares and 12 comments I am Winner with next Title of blog post : Top 10 startup social media curation tools for Social learning in the workplace who will change research in XXI Century Education . Now I want to invite you to join my Curation session / online wiziq class  in Connecting Online 2013 Conference https://www.facebook.com/events/314906631960258/ to read my greetings for you in 2013 and 2012 year in review http://bitly.com/LucianeCuratorwishyouHAPPYNEWYEAR2013 and my letter to Santa using a startup social media curation tool http://checkthis.com/fvn/ where I please him to help me to win the Ipad competition and I pray to God to help me to implement a platform / website for Curation Restart  Education Project http://krunchd.com/CredProject ;  ; https://twitter.com/web20education . 
             Now I must told you that I will continue to write on this blog about TOP 10 weekly and your repplies, comments ; feed-back is welcome for all my blog posts.
                                                       


I chose to write about this topic now because I discover in 2011 a new social media king who is Curation, the Art of : searching, selecting, sharing/bookmarking , organizing, interaction, communication, . In XXI Century Education where informatics and science developed spectacular and the use of new technologies aren’t regarded like a avangardist movement new tools and apps Web 2.0 and socialmedia can bring a new dimension and can reform education around the world because electroniccommunication helps teachers and students to learn from each other.These new tehnologies can stimulate discussion, open gatewaythrough knowledge, promote creativity and innovation for effective learning. Teacher and also students should have an entitlement to safe internet access at all times. Pulling Piaget and Papert, the use of participatory media tools in education is typically geared towards, creating a more student centered in a adaptive environnement where learners can contribute to the course material,formulate and express their own insights and opinion, construct their own understanding of materialby connecting concepts, to personal experience or current events, and learn from one another in collaborative environments . Web 2.0, social media and other digital and information tehnologies are powerful and interesting tools,which open up new opportunities for everyone and for this reason teachers and students must know how to use it in nowadays education The Internet Curator’s role is to seek on the web information related to a specific domain, flter them, select them, organise, share and present them in a unique mode .

For this reason I want to implement the project Curation Restart Education Project http://krunchd.com/CredProjectNow I will describe my favrorites / top 10 startup curation tools who will bring a new dimmension for XXI Century Education although I discover this year more than 100 and you can read about here http://edtech20curationprojectineducation.blogspot.ro/ and about startup edtools and edapps here http://startup4edu.blogspot.ro/ and also about ipad apps to mLearning here : http://ipadappsineducationtomlearning.blogspot.ro/
Now here is the article with logos and links because I use all next tools almost daily  .


1. Glogster Edu is my favorite curation and presentation tool and I am proud to be a Ambassador.This edu tool open gateway through knowledge for students because develop children’s creativity and innovation . Glogster EDU is the leading global education platform for the creative expression of knowledge and skills in the classroom and beyond. GlogsterEdu empower educators and students with the technology to create GLOGS - online multimedia posters - with text, photos, videos, graphics,sounds, drawings, data attachments and more. I made a GlogsterEdu for Curation Restart Education Project http://dumacornellucian.edu.glogster.com/credproject/ 
2. Scoop.it enables professionals to share important ideas with the right audiences giving them an opportunity to create and maintain a meaningful Web presence, a crucial component to the success of their business and career. Scoop.it lets you share ideas that matter and shine on the Web through beautiful topic pages. Collect relevant content and add your insight to attract an avid audience. Whether you’re a professional or educator representing a business or nonprofit, Scoop.it will help you efficiently and effectively build your online presence. Scoop.it is a one-stop shop for social media and content curation publishing. When you post on your topic page, you can easily share to your social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Advanced analytics available on Scoop.it Pro and customizable pages, post scheduling and Wordpress integration available on Scoop.it Business. 


3. Learnist is the latest social media curation tool for education , still in beta launch by Grockit team . Learnist super easy to share what you know by pointing to existing web resources. You can use videos, blogs, books, documents, images, anything to explain how to learn something.Use Learnist to share what you know and learn new things. Create Learn Boards on topics you understand and add learnings by pointing to videos, blogs, images and documents on the web. Board creation permissions are granted on rolling basis.
                                   
4.Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. Teachers use pinboards to manage their projects and also People use pinboards plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. To get started, request an invite or leave a comment after you read my post with your email and I will send you a invitation to try this curation tool . Also don't forget that you must pin a immage to bookmark on pinterest . 
5 . Mentormob is a social media startup curation tool who make learning online free and accessible to the entire world . One Learning Playlist Can Reach Millions...Creating and editing Learning Playlists is a free and easy process. Not only does it show the world what you know, but it opens your knowledge to people who share your skills so they can help you refine it by adding and editing your Learning Playlist. Each Learning Playlist can be rated, bringing the best ways to learn to the top of the charts.Creating and editing Learning Playlists opens the door to being able to share your skills and get feedback from those who share your passion.So finally, we can get some real organization when learning online because after all, it's not up to the Internet to make learning free and accessible to the world, it's up to us.
 
6. Mightybell This is about infusing passion and color into everyday life. Too often, we spend time on what we have to do, not what we want to do. We’ve lost the ability to follow what makes us curious, in favor of choosing what makes us more efficient.With Mightybell, you can step into a world of curiosity and serendipity. By making space for ideas, interests and adventures with friends, you’re embracing the opportunity to create a more colorful life. Each Mightybell space has a story, one you can share with as many likeminded people as you want. You can share : a question, an article, a link, a video or a photo about something that interests you is all you need to start a Mightybell space. After all, you never know when you’ll discover your next passion.

 

7. Springpad Smart Notebooks to save, share and act on what's important to you and to your friends .Springpad now makes it easy to invite your friends so you can make awesome notebooks together. Springpad is great for just about anything and it's even better when you invite your friends.Springing just got easier .Now you can just type in the information you want to save and let Springpad do the rest. Try typing in a task you want to remember, an event you want to save, a movie you want to see, or a product you want to buy. It's that easy!
                                  
8. SymbalooEdu is a social media curation tool, great resource for teachers. With Symbaloo you can: Gather the best content on the web about 1 topic, and present it on a webmix Share a webmix with other teachers, and students . Discover useful webmixes in the Symbaloo Gallery to use in the classroom Share a webmix withparents to provide some insight of the used materials A worthy mention: Symbaloo is free of charge and doesn’t include any annoying ads.
                            

9. Zeen is a social media startup curation tool launch by Avos ( YouTube Co-founders) who offer a cool new way to share your interests with the world – bring pictures, prose, and videos together in eye-catching digital magazines.                                
10 . Socl — pronounced social — allows you to express and share your ideas through rich post collages comprised of images, links, captions and videos.Socl is a research project from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs and began as an experiment in social search targeted at students for the purpose of learning. Following the lead of the Socl community, Socl has since evolved to be a service where people connect over shared interests expressed through beautiful posts that take only seconds to create.

With consideration and respect http://xeeme.com/Lucianecurator/

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From a NYTimes piece, Saying No to College:
So in the spring of 2010, Mr. Goering took the same leap as Mr. Zuckerberg: he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco to make his mark. He got a job as a software engineer at a social-software company, Livefyre, run by a college dropout, where the chief technology officer at the time and a lead engineer were also dropouts. None were sheepish about their lack of a diploma. Rather, they were proud of their real-life lessons on the job.

“Education isn’t a four-year program,” Mr. Goering said. “It’s a mind-set.”

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to “hacking” higher education. Inspired by billionaire role models, and empowered by online college courses, they consider themselves a D.I.Y. vanguard, committed to changing the perception of dropping out from a personal failure to a sensible option, at least for a certain breed of risk-embracing maverick.
How long can college last if the best and the brightest walk away from it?

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Rather than pick up the story of my involvement in academic publishing where I left off in the first post, in 2006 or so after having published several long articles in PsyArt, I want to go back to the 1990s and pick up some email action. That was quite important, both for the conversations, and the people I met through those conversations. It remains an important part of my digital mix, though not so important in the overall flow of things.

Listserves: Memetics and Evolutionary Psych

Judging from the email I’ve got stashed on my computer, I joined a memetics listserve in the middle of 1997. As you may know memetics is the study of memes. I don’t know who coined the term “memetics” but Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as the cultural analogy to the biological gene. As I was and remain very interested in cultural evolution it was natural that I join that listserve.

An email list is not, of course, a formal means of academic publication nor is it even informal publication comparable to blogging. It’s a conversation, or can be, but not like face-to-face or telephone. On a listserve you typically have many people who receive messages but do not themselves make comments. And that means that, when you do make a comment to the list, you have no idea what most of your audience is thinking—which, of course, is just like ordinary print publication or, for that matter, digital publication as well. But the overall dynamic is one of interaction, so you and your interlocutors are, in effect, putting on a show for an undisclosed population of lurkers. Listserve conversation are also notorious for degenerating into flame wars, but that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. It’s just something that happens.

But you can also have useful conversations. The memetics list gave me a good sense of the state of play in the memetics world, which is a peculiar one. Though the idea was hatched by a card-carrying academic of high order, Richard Dawkins, and has a small following in the academy (e.g. Daniel Dennett among others), it hadn’t gained traction in the academy back then—the late 1990s—and still hasn’t. Perhaps it’s a superb idea that’s just too “out there” for hide-bound academics, or perhaps it’s not such a good idea. Myself, I’m somewhere between those two views.
Which is neither here nor there. Given that THAT’s how things went, much of the discussion took place between people of very different intellectual backgrounds and experience, with only a few of us being card-carrying academics—and, of course, though I may carry a card, I do so only as an independent scholar not as a member of this or that faculty. That makes for an interesting and often challenging environment, as it’s very difficult to carry the day by pulling rank. In that environment the only rank you have is what people give you. Institutions don’t much matter, unless of course, you grant them status.

Which could lead into an interesting discussion of the role of status and expertise in discussions. But that too would be a distraction at this point. Suffice it to say that I believe that, on the whole, it’s a good thing that people with varying levels of expertise can have such discussions even if it does have its frustrations.

One of the people I met on the listserve—I think that’s where I met him, though I’m not sure—is Tim Perper. Like me, Tim’s an independent scholar. He was trained in genetics and molecular biology, held jobs in industry and academia, and went independent so he could study and publish on human courtship in a broad interdisciplinary way ranging from ethnographic observation, through literature, to complex dynamical systems.

Tim and I became friends and colleagues on that listserve. Later on he would introduce me to manga and anime, which I decided to study. He also introduced me to Howard Bloom, a brilliant man who’d been in public relations in pop music (Michael Jackson had been one of his clients) and at some point decided he wanted to spend his time thinking about human culture and the universe and everything. Which he’s done. His work lacks the kind of rigor that would make it deeply useful to me but it’s full of fascinating anecdotes and Bloom himself has attracted a considerable popular following. And, wouldn’t you know it, it’s through him that I got the contract on Beethoven’s Anvil.

Thanks, Howard!

It was during this period that I spent half a year teaching that online course in African-American music that I mentioned in my earlier post. That too was an email affair.

So we have one medium, email, and two very different institutional uses, credit-carrying course work in one case, open-ended discussion in the other. Neither was a vehicle for academic publishing, but both were and are vehicles for communicating ideas. Online education has grown considerably since then, and the platforms are considerably more sophisticated now, including full video and automated grading of tests.

Listserves remain as well. I dropped the memetics listserve, or perhaps it just died. But I remain on an evolutionary psychology listserve, one that had been started by Ian Pitchford (who sold it several years ago). That listserve is long past its glory days and I rarely post anything to it; but it continues to be a useful source of information about the current literature. I am subscribed to several other listserves, but only one of them is particularly active, one for trumpet players.

Enter the Blogosphere: The Valve (plus Graffiti and Animation)

Now, let’s pick up the story where the previous post had left off. I’d been publishing long, complex, and very specialized articles in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Meanwhile, the blogosphere had erupted.

How do I get in on that action?

During that period an old teacher of mine, Bruce Jackson at SUNY Buffalo, was publishing an occasional online rag he called Buffalo Report (which ceased a few years ago). He posted notice of an upcoming discussion that sounded interesting to me. The discussion was to be around and about an anthology called Theory’s Empire, which was critiquing the body of work that had become known as Theory in literary studies. This discussion was to be held at a group blog called The Valve.

I decided to check it out. Once the discussion got started I waded right in, making comments right and left, as it were. To be sure, I hadn’t read Theory’s Empire, but I had little trouble following the posts and the discussions as I more or less knew what they were about. And, it turned out, I knew things that most of the discussants did not.

I had been an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins when the French landed, and I did my graduate work at SUNY Buffalo, which was well stocked with French Theory. I’d seen the birth of the intellectual movement which was under consideration in this online confab. I found myself telling stories about what it had been like in the old days. A novel, and bemusing, role for me.

In time I was asked to become a contributor to The Valve. I jumped at the chance. I did so not merely because it gave me a platform where I could reach an audience of academic literary folks and fellow travelers. A platform, yes. But more so, a forum for interaction.

I figured that, if I wanted to communicate my ideas to an audience of academic literary folks, I needed to get in there and find out what kinds of ideas they were willing and able to hear. Conversation was the only way to do that.

At the same time I found my way to American Airspace, the blog of Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Penn State who had established himself as a public intellectual commenting on politics and disability, though not so prominent as such figures as Cornel West, Steven Pinker, or Richard Dawkins.

I became a regular commenter at Bérubé’s joint. Michael kept up an exhausting schedule, posting once a day during the week (in addition, of course, to his normal academic duties and his family life). Some of this posts were quite substantial, “long-form” as the idiom has it. For awhile he ran a very useful series of posts on literary theory, aka Theory. He also posted on sports, music, movies—pop culture in general—and about his son, Jaime, who has Down syndrome (hence Bérubé’s interest in disability studies).

And then there was the great online show trial for his friend, Chris Clark, on charges of an obscure and vaguely specified nature, an event that defies description, though I’ve tried to do so in The Great Show Trial of Two-Ought-Ought-Six. It was staged in the name of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party (WAAGNFNP) and involved a cast of 10s, if not 100s (or 1000a including lurkers), over several weeks at the end of 2006. It was an online Saturnalia the likes of which the web tubes have never seen since.

Which is to say, it was a lot of fun. And that’s useful to know, that the internet can be fun.

It was about that time, the Great Show Trial, that I became interested in graffiti. So I set out to photograph graffiti in my neighborhood, downtown Jersey City, and posted photographs online. I did so, not so much because I wanted others to see them, but because I wanted graffiti writers to see them and help me to identify the artists.

Which they did. There is a large online community of graffiti writers and people interested in graffiti. No sooner is a piece of graffiti painted than a photograph shows up on the web and people can see it around the world.

There are online communities of all kinds. Some ephemeral, some quite serious and long-lasting (so far). The graffiti community is quite diffuse, as is the animation community, which I found as a consequence of becoming interested in anime, thanks to Tim Perper. But I’m also interested in animation in general, Disney in particular. And so I found my way to Mike Barrier’s site.

Barrier, though not trained as a scholar, is perhaps America’s premier historian of animation, having published a major history, Hollywood Cartoons, and a biography of Walt Disney, The Animated Man. Beyond that he’s done a wealth of primary research in the form of numerous interviews with major figures in animation, many of which are on line, and he’s trolled through the archives here and there (including the Library of Congress), publishing some of that material online as well.

I’ve had a fair amount of correspondence with Barrier, and he’s published a few of my essays on his website. I value his opinion of my work; he’s an invaluable source of insight and crap detection. Like Tim Perper, he’s become a colleague, though I’ve only met him once face-to-face (I’ve seen Tim several times as he lives in Philadelphia, which isn’t far from Jersey City, where I live).

In general, the online animation world is rich. There is, of course, a lot of fan material. But many animators maintain websites and blogs and Barrier is by no means the only one to post primary resource material online–interviews, letters, story boards, shooting scripts, drawings, and so forth. There’s quite a bit of it. I’d hesitate to call it a scholar’s paradise but a jungle, yes. A wild jungle full of animation-related stuff, much of it of interest to serious scholars of animation.

Such a world simply didn’t exist before the flowering of the web in the past decade and a half. While there is some academic interest in animation and cartoons, there isn’t much, not compared to the interest in literature or even live-action film, and much of that interest is fairly recent. There are probably a few animation research centers here and there, but, I’d venture, the online world is currently the richest source of readily available research materials and discussion about animation. This world couldn’t exist without the internet.

The National Humanities Center: On the Human

Meanwhile, back in the conventional academic world, the National Humanities Center had sponsored an interdisciplinary project designed to create dialogs between humanists and scholars in the newer psychologies and in evolutionary biology. The project, On the Human, had three components: fellowships for scholars in residence at the center in North Carolina, a series of lectures by distinguished senior scholars in a variety of disciplines that took place from 2006 to 2009, and series of online discussions that ran from 2009 to 2012. Each discussion was focused by an invited essay, but the discussion itself was open to anyone.

Just as I jumped at the chance to wade into discussions at The Valve, so I waded in on these discussions as well. In time I was invited to contribute an essay to the series, which, of course, I was glad to do. I chose cultural evolution as my topic and my rather longish essay, Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities, appeared on July 1, 2010.

During the run-up to that essay I tried an experiment. I wrote a series of background essays which I posted both at The Valve and at my personal blog, New Savanna. Each of these essays expanded on some issue that I discussed in my essay for On the Human, which could then be linked to those background essays. When I’d finished those essays I gathered them together into a single PDF which I then posted as a working paper on my page at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which I’d previously used only for essays I’d published in the formal academic literature. That PDF turned out to be 64 pages long and have over 30,000 words, a small monograph.

The Blogosphere and Beyond

And THAT has now become my routine practice. In some cases I’ve simply gathered a variety of related posts into a single PDF. But in other cases I would start posting on a topic with the intention of gathering a number of posts into a single document.

I did that in 2011 with a series of posts on Apocalypse Now, another series on Heart of Darkness, a third series on Latour’s Reassembing the Social, and a fourth series on Disney’s Fantasia (though I’d begun that series a couple of years before with two or three posts intended as one-offs at the time). Earlier this year (2012) I’ve gone the same route with Disney’s Dumbo and with a whole bunch of posts occasioned by object-oriented ontology.

That last bunch started out in 2011 as various more or less independently conceived posts. In July of this year, however, it became apparent that I needed to go beyond commenting on other scholars’ philosophical ideas. I needed to elaborate ideas of my own. At that point I knew I would be gathering subsequent posts into PDFs. As it turns out, I’ve created several PDFs out of this material and will be creating a few more.

On the one had I have what I think of as the mainline of posts, which bears the central argument. As of this moment that mainline is not complete. I have two more posts in mind to complete it, though it’s possible that I’ll need to write more. But there are a lot of related posts that are off the mainline, as it were. I’ve been bundling some of them as well.

Thus, from the mainline I’ve created a PDF specifically about literary criticism: Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World. I’ve also ‘published’ two collections of side posts: Reading with Graham, A Working Paper on the Emptiness of Counter-Factual Criticism and an OOO Conception of the Text, and Ontological Cognition: A Working Paper. When I finish the mainline I will, of course, bundle those posts into a document (which will include the posts I’ve bundled into Literary Criticism 21) and I’ll create a number of subsidiary PDFs as well.

As far as I’m concerned, this is a new mode of academic “publishing”—or at least the publishing of serious ideas. I put publishing in quotes because this is not, of course, formal academic publishing through an academic press, the journal literature, or peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Those working papers I’ve placed at SSRN have no standing in the formal academic world. They don’t exist. But then neither do I.

None of these online publications has the full array of comparative discussion and citation that is typical of formal academic publication on film and fiction. Yet, though these working papers lack full scholarly apparatus, they’re considerably more refined than working notes. My working notes are for me only, to remind me of this and that, to allow me to work out this or that idea. As such I take no pains to present them in a way that would be intelligible to others. But blog posts, no matter how informal, are intended to be read by others, and so are the working papers I derive from them.

Still, they ARE working papers and their relatively informal nature would be a tough sell for formal publication. But they’d be a tough sell on other counts as well.

For one thing, a number of them aren’t of a length suitable for any of the standard formats, a problem I discussed in my first post, and a number of them are also problematic because of their illustrations. In particular, the PDFs discussing movies (Apocalypse Now, Fantasia, and Dumbo) have way too many frame grabs for any form of print publication. And yet those frame grabs present the primary material, the film imagery. Forcing the reader either to rely on an inevitably faulty memory or to come up with the films themselves would just get in the way of effective comprehension.

Beyond that, there’s the fact that so much of the work simply doesn’t fall within existing conceptual boundaries. Now, the fact is that, from my early publication on semantic networks in MLN (Modern Language Notes) up through the essays I published in PsyArt, I have found places willing to accept deeply speculative work. It’s a bit of a slog, but venues do exist, though the typical publication schedule is a pain. However, at this point in my career it’s not clear what publishing in such venues gets me.

Yes, it gets me quality points, but how important are they to a scholar who doesn’t operate within academia? Nor is it at all obvious that such publishing gets me readers. And that’s what’s important, no?

When I make posts to New Savanna I know whether or not anyone reads them, though I don’t know who my readers are unless they post comments. And when I post documents at SSRN I know whether or not anyone downloads them. Again, I don’t know who downloads them, but I at least I know that someone was interested enough to download them.

That’s more information than I’ve ever gotten out of formal publication in the academic literature.

And So? Five Animated Features

The major point of this story, the one told in my first post and continuing on into this one, is simple:
In the past 15 years the internet has afforded me an intellectual life that would have otherwise been impossible for me operating as an independent scholar.
While it has changed the lives of scholars within the academy, I suspect the change is not so dramatic. Many of course ignore the online world, except perhaps when it comes time to search for books and research articles or to send an email or two to colleagues. Those who embrace the technology get more from it, but it’s not the difference between night and day. Even as they embrace the technology, they still have the benefit of discussions with colleagues on the ground and at conferences (yes, I COULD go to conferences, but I can’t afford to). And they get to teach students, which is a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.

Without the internet I’d have none of those things. With it I can contact just about any scholar I wish, and have done so. Many have replied and entered into correspondence. It’s safe to say that my intellectual productivity during the past 15 years is higher than it would have been without the internet. For me, the difference is comparable to that between night and day.

To be sure, only some of that productivity has been captured by institutions that give me standing within academia. But there HAS been some of that, enough to put a patina of legitimacy on my CV. As for all that other work...Well I can always set about working it up in forms that would make it publishable in the formal journal literature, but I’m in no rush to do so. I’m more likely to seek publication of a book through an academic press, but I won’t go about writing that book in the way I would have 10 or 15 years ago.

Here the difference between academic publishing and trade publishing is important. I got a contract for Beethoven’s Anvil on the basis of a proposal and a writing sample. That’s how trade publication of non-fiction works. Academic publishing is different. There you have to submit a complete manuscript.

So, how do I intend to produce a complete manuscript? I’ll start by blogging. That certainly wouldn’t work for many projects, but for the one I’m currently considering it will.

The project I’m thinking about is a book about animation: Five Animated Features. I’ve already blogged a great deal of material on Fantasia and Dumbo, two of the features I want to consider. I’ve got more material on those films than I would want to use in the book. That means I’ll have to edit the material down, and that’s always a good thing to do.

I’ve also written some posts on Porco Rosso and Ratatouille, two of the other films I want to cover. I plan to do more blogging on both of those films, and initiate blogging on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the fifth film I want to cover. At the same time I will, of course, be posting other pieces on film, animation, methodology, animals, and so forth. I figure that in half a year or a year, perhaps more, I’ll have blogged the whole territory I want to cover in the book. At that time I’ll sit back and see whether I have what I need to edit it down into a coherent book.

We’ll see.

Beyond that I note that, at long last, the institutional nature of the academic world is changing, and with it, academic publishing. I make no predictions about how that will work out 10, 20, or 50 years from now.

But, it WILL be different, it really will.

Who knows, it may even be more open to new ideas, though that will require explicit norms encouraging novelty. We’ll see.

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When I entered Johns Hopkins as a freshman in the Fall of 1965 academic publication was all hard copy; back then, that was the ONLY kind of copy there was. Computers were the size of gymnasiums and the internet didn’t exist. Academic publication consisted of articles, books and this that and the other, but all on paper.

And that’s still how most of it is, especially the prestige tier. If you want to get tenure and fame at schools that prize publication, you have to publish well in the hard copy literature, books if you’re a humanist, articles otherwise.

When I set out in academia I wanted a good permanent post, at a good school, and, yes, a bit of fame, enough to help the ideas along. Things didn’t work out that way. Instead, I’ve watched, and published from outside academia.

I figure that, by the time that the old ways have crumbled, perhaps some of the fugitives will be ready to listen to what I’ve been thinking over the past three decades or so. And I’ll have lots for them to read, some of it published in the traditional way, even well published; but some of it published in non-standard ways.

But this post, and a later one, isn’t about those ideas. It’s about how I’ve published my work and how that’s been changing. In this post I go from the beginning of my career though the microfiche experiment of the American Journal of Computational Linguistics and up to yesterday (well, five years or so ago), when I published four longish articles in a new online journal, PsyArt. In a second post I’ll discuss the blogosphere and beyond.

The Old Way

My first academic publication was a page and a half in an edited volume, a comment on Neville Dyson-Hudson’s essay in Macksey and Donato, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. That came out in 1970, when I was a master’s student in the Humanities Seminar at Hopkins. My first article, “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics,” came out in 1976 in the Comparative Literature issue of MLN. When the issue came out I got a packet of off-prints, copies of my article that I could give to people.

In the months following publication I received a some postcards requesting copies of my article. The postcards were mostly preprinted forms with a blank line where the name of the article and journal would be printed or scrawled. That’s how it was in those days and, presumably, going back decades before. Photocopying existed but it wasn’t so cheap and ubiquitous that scholars could routinely make photocopies of articles rather than collecting off-prints.

The system didn’t work particularly well. Even then it was clear the most articles didn’t get read and that journals were routinely backlogged. But it was what we had.

Microfiche Experiment

Then, while I was in graduate school at SUNY Buffalo, I took part in an experiment, an innovation in journal publication. David G. Hays was the editor of the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (now just Computational Linguistics), the journal for the Association for Computational Linguistics. And he decided to address two of the issues plaguing journal publishing, 1) relatively high production costs and long lead times and 2) article size.

Print publication is relatively expensive. Once an article has been refereed and accepted the article must be typeset and illustrations, if any, photographed and engraved. Proof copies are made, corrected, returned, and the corrections entered into the system, whatever it was. Then the journal issue could be printed. All of that took time and money.

Further, articles were limited in size, usually no more than ten to twelve-thousand words or so and generally less, often much less. Books and monographs, on the other hand, were generally fifty-thousand words or more. So anything that was over 12,000 and less than 50,000 words long didn’t fit into the system.

That constraint has nothing whatever to do with the “size” of ideas, with the number of words (and perhaps diagrams as well) required to express an idea in a coherent and intelligible way. At arises from the economics of hard copy publishing. But it affects what is published and how.

Hays proposed to deal with these problems by publishing on microfiche. In this format individual pages where photographed onto a piece of film measuring roughly six inches wide and four inches high. One piece of film could image 98 pages of standard typing paper (8.5 by 11 inches) in a 14 by 7 array. At roughly 250 words per double-spaced typed page you could get almost 25,000 words on a single piece of film.

This format allowed for longer articles and a shorted production time. Authors would submit articles and they’d be refereed in the usual way. Once an article was accepted the authors themselves would prepare camera-ready copy on standard letter-size pages, including any illustrations (gray scale only). Most papers were typed, but some authors had access to new-fangled laser printers and used them for their copy. When it was time for an issue to go to press, the editor’s assistant (I held the post for three years) would prepare hard copy for the index cards that accompanied the microfiche and the whole stack of papers was shipped off to the production house, where the pages were photographed, printed to film, and the journal packets mailed to subscribers. Here’s two examples from the journal:

AJCL

AJCLyerkish

The first image shows the association’s newsletter, The Finite String, which consisted of a bunch of short pieces of one kind or another. The second fiche contains a single article, The Yerkish Language for Non-Human Primates by Ernst von Glasersfeld.

The system worked fine. Long articles were no longer a problem nor were illustrations an issue. You can photograph an illustration as easily as a page of type. And the system shaved months off the standard publication schedule.

The only problem was the format itself. You needed a reader to read microfiche. Libraries had them and there were small units individuals could buy. But it was awkward.

The experiment was discontinued in 1978 and the journal resumed hard copy publication in 1980. Meanwhile I finished my Ph.D. and proceeded to publish a variety of articles in various academic journals, all hardcopy, all with reprints, and so forth. One journal in particular, The Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, edited by Paul Levinson, become something of a home base for me, and for David Hays as well.

The Web

And then the web appeared in the mid-1990s. It was built on back of the internet, which the Defense Department and academics used for email and file transfers of all kinds. AOL, CompuServe, and others offered commercial internet services to users of all kinds but the explosion didn’t begin until the browser was born and the internet became the visually oriented world-wide-web.

In 1994 a Shearson-Lehman banker named Bill Berry started an email newsletter called Meanderings and he also showed up on AOL under the name of Cuda Brown. That’s where I met him. We liked one another and, in short order, decided to see if we could have some fun and make our fortune by creating an African-America website. Bill refitted Meanderings for the web; I contributed articles and art. Meanderings was then incorporated into Gravity.

We had a nice run for a year or so in the mid-1990s but didn’t come anywhere near a commercial venture. So we folded shop.

(And, yes, I know this article is about academic publication. I’ll get there before too long. But this internet and web stuff is important. It’s what I knew by the time blogging was born.)

But we did some interesting things. We knew the future was interactive so we had a Bright Moments Contest in which we asked readers to send in their stories of Bright Moments. And they did. Bill coded up a discussion forum and we had some wonderful discussions, which are, alas, lost (unless they’re hanging around in the Wayback machine). We did a collaboration with Vibe magazine about the OJ Simpson trial. And, while we were not an academic journal, one up-and-coming African American intellectual, Lester Kenyatta Spence, published in Meanderings: Black Colleges Should Be Black.

And, on the side, I coded up my own personal website which Bill hosted on the newsavanna.com domain, which he bought for our project and which he still owns. There I put some of my academic work, in particular the work that David Hays and I did on cultural evolution. During that period I also taught an online course on African-American music through a degree-granting online media studies program run by Paul Levinson through the New School in New York City. David Hays taught a course on the history of technology in that same program; one of his students, Paul Kelly, now hosts the academic portion of that old hand-coded site, which includes the book (The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks) that Hays wrote for his course.

Which brings us back to my topic, academic publication. In the various pieces I wrote for Meanderings/Gravity I was writing for a general audience, though on topics that interested me as an academic. I have since republished many of those pieces first on The Valve and now New Savanna. At the same time I was teaching a credit-earning online course via email exchanges. Both activities involve writing, but for an electronic medium, not hardcopy.

Thus when the blogosphere hatched itself I was ready, though for this that or the other reason I didn’t jump right in.

Beethoven’s Anvil and PsyArt

During the late 1990s and on into the new millennium most of my time was tied up in a software venture that eventually failed. By that time I had a book contract with Basic Books and was working on Beethoven’s Anvil.

That book was and is a strange beast. Basic Books is a trade press, not an academic press, but it publishes fairly scholarly books such as (I’m looking over at one of my bookshelves) the three volumes of John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss, Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Volume II, and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Beethoven’s Anvil was aimed at the general audience that buys books by Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and others. As such it had ample citations, but it did not have full scholarly apparatus, nor was it academic in style and approach. I didn’t spend a lot of time, for example, weighing the merits of various discussions of this that and the other account on a given issue. To have done so would have doubled or tripled the size of the book and put it even further beyond the reach of a general audience than it already is.

The fact is, my overall argument was more abstract than the arguments of just about any of the books published into the general interest mind-and-society market. The book was, in effect, written for full-time intellectuals but NOT for specialists in any particular discipline. It required the sort of intellectual sophistication and intense curiousity that comes with academic specialization, but it did not require specialization in any particular discipline. The discussion ranged widely over many disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and music history.

It was, and is, a crazy book. Too sophisticated for a general audience, too wide-ranging for an academic one. How it got published I’ll never know.

Once I’d finished writing Beethoven’s Anvil I returned to my old intellectual territory, literary studies, and between 2000 and 2006 ended up publishing four articles in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. “Online”—that’s crucial. That’s a major reason I submitted to PsyArt. Each of those articles ran over 20,000 words and each had diagrams, some of them fairly complicated. Quite independently of the intellectual content of the articles, those features alone would have rendered the work unpublishable in the hard-copy world. They’re too long for journal publication and too short for book or monograph publication. In either case, they involve diagrams that would entail added expense, especially if they were to be printed in color.

On the web diagrams are no big deal. Nor is the difference between black-and-white and color diagrams. As long as the author provides suitable digital files, publishing diagrams and illustrations is no more difficult than publishing text. Not so in the world of hard-copy publishing. Black and white diagrams and illustrations aren’t so bad, assuming the author prepares them to spec; but color diagrams require a much more expensive printing process, which may also involve special paper and thus make binding more complex and expensive as well.

So, having a journal that can deal with my diagrams is very important. The diagrams are central to my thinking, especially where I’m undertaking the analysis of complex cognitive structures, which I did in those four articles. Those diagrams aren’t mere illustrations of ideas that can be adequately expressed in prose. The diagrams ARE the ideas. Without them there’s nothing to talk about.

Thus, while it is certainly a good thing that the editors of PsyArt were willing to consider my distinctly unconventional ideas, the process wouldn’t have gotten even that far if the publication platform hadn’t been able to accommodate the physical expression of those ideas in the form of diagrams. And color diagrams at that. While I could have made do with gray scale diagrams, the fact is that some of the diagrams were complicated enough that color-coding was, in my opinion, helpful. Gray-scale diagrams would not have been as readable.

The medium may not in fact be the message, but in this case the flexibility of the digital medium made it practical to present and communicate the message. Print simply is not up to that kind of job. I might have been able to write those articles back in, say, 1990, but there wouldn’t have been any place to publish them.

And now that they’re published, and on the web, anyone can access them from a web-connected computer. As PsyArt is free to all, you need not pay annoying charges to access its articles, nor do you need to be a member of a university community. You just need to have an internet connection and a modest computer. That’s a major change from what existed during my freshman year in the 1960s.

But technical change isn’t enough. We need institutional change as well. That’s much more difficult and much messier.

* * * * * 

Part 2 is HERE. There I discuss email lists, the blogosphere, and how I'm using blogging as a means of developing ideas for possible use in more formal publishing.

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This is the introduction to a report that I've placed at my SSRN page. You may download the PDF there: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2177965
Abstract: The human sciences encompass a wide variety of disciplines: literary studies, musicology, art history, anthropology (cultural and physical), psychology (perceptual, cognitive, evolutionary, Freudian, etc.), sociology, political science, economics, history, cultural geography, and so forth. In this paper I process to organize courses and curricula aso as to include: 1) material from three different methodological styles (interpretive, behavioral or social scientific, and structural/constructive: linguistics, cognitive science), 2) historical and structural/functional approaches, and 3) materials from diverse cultures. The overall scheme is exemplified by two versions of a course on Signs and Symbols, one organized around a Shakespeare play and the other organized around traditional disciplines.
My first and only faculty appointed was in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, a very good engineering school, the oldest in the country. During the summer of 1985 the school of Humanities and Social Sciences embarked on one of those periodic soul-searching exercises academic units undertake in order to revitalize their mission and–hope! hope!–increase the budget. Accordingly, the school offered a number of faculty small stipends to develop innovative brand-spanking new courses which they would present at a faculty retreat.

I took one of those grants despite the fact that I would not be returning in the Fall and developed, not a course, but an approach to curriculum design which is camouflaged as a strategy for designing a large lecture-based introductory course. I understand that such courses have been getting a bad rap, and I even understand why, I think. Nonetheless if I had to do it again in this new millennium I would. But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s important is the method I used. It’s a method that could be used in designing any course in the human sciences whatsoever, though its interdisciplinary nature is particularly suited to the large introductory course as that’s the kind of course the could most readily command the participation of faculty from a half-dozen or more disciplines. But the method could also be used in planning a suite of modules to be offered online and which individual students could organize into individualized programs that nonetheless met a coherent set of overall curricular goals.

The scheme is designed to organize materials according to three high-level criteria:
  • interpretive (hermeneutic), social and behavioral scientific, and structural (in the style of linguistics) approaches are all represented,
  • historical (diachronic) and structural/functional (synchronic) approaches are represented,
  • material from other, preferably nonWestern, cultures is presented.
Thus each module would employ either an interpretive, a social scientific, or a structural methodology and would be either historical or structural/functional in character. A student’s suite of modules would have to represent each of the three methodological styles, include both diachronic and functional topics and include materials from a range of different cultures.

This, I know, is all rather abstract. But I flesh it out in the full report by designing two versions of a course, Signs and Symbols, having 12 modules. I call one-version of the course “top-down” because it’s organized in a fairly conventional way as a selection of different topics under the general rubric of sign systems and communications. That is, it proceeds from some conception of how knowledge is structured and generates topics from that, top-down. Obviously there are a zillion ways of designing such a course and no double half of them have already been offered at one time or another. What’s important is the overall distribution of topics, not the specific topics themselves.

The other version of the course is rather different. I selected a specific text, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and generated the 12 modules from that text. The modules are somewhat different from those in the top-down version of the course but they satisfy the same distribution requirements, covering the three methodologies (interpretive, social scientific, structural), both diachronic and functional topics, and a variety of cultures. Were I to redesign that course today I’d be inclined to swap Disney’s Fantasia for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The collection of different topics would change, of course, but the same design criteria would be met.

But one needn’t use a text. Why not use the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as a case study? Little Egypt performed on the midway; the Japanese sent a delegation, their first to America; the Ferris wheel was invented and available for rides; electric power was put to large-scale use for the first time; Cracker Jacks, Cream of Wheat, Shredded Wheat, and Pabst Beer were introduced to the world; and all in white temporary structures designed in Beaux Arts style.

The possibilities are endless. What stays the same through all of them is the overall set of cognitive goals: methodological diversity, historical and structural/functional thinking, and cultural diversity.

Of those I would particularly emphasize methodological diversity. People need to think about problems in a variety of distinctly different ways. The inability to do so is perhaps the single greatest weakness in specifically humanities education and practice. You really can’t understand human life only through interpretive methodologies. You need to understand how social and behavioral scientists construct models and test them against evidence. And you need to understand the structural and computational models used by linguistics and cognitive science, for those models are our best chance of gaining a deeper understanding of the human mind.

I’m particularly struck how, despite the apparent flourishing of digital humanities, these digital humanists confine computational thinking to their software and seem uninterested in or incapable of thinking about computational models of the mind. But that’s where the deep stuff is. Yes, we need tools that allow us to grapple with big piles of data, but there’s not much point to that if we don’t think more deeply and creatively about how the mind works, both individually and collectively.

At the moment the digital humanities seems headed along a track parallel to that taken by the neurosciences in the last two decades. Those folks have devoted enormous time and effort to developing sophisticated tools for imaging the brain and for analyzing tons of data, but they’re still thinking about mental operations in terms much like those from 50 years ago. For all practical purposes they’re thinking about homunculi passing messages back and forth.

But I digress.

The only way to get past that conceptual log jam is to learn distinctly different methods of thinking and constructing models. That’s what this paper is about, a scheme for organizing those methods into a coherent overall pattern of instruction and learning.

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I consider myself very lucky to be working alongside academics on a college campus, and not for the reasons one might think. True, I am grateful for a fulfilling job in a difficult economy, but I’m lucky because I frequently find myself in rich conversations with critical thinkers about important topics of the day. I […]

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This presentation was something of a general idea we submitted to our Summer Research conference.  It was based on the notion of two very different approaches to e-learning - mine from an Educational Studies approach, Graham's from an Computer Sci...
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