I think I’ll be buying a lot more books, doing a lot of renewals, and re-borrowing books after the 16 week period is up. I can’t imagine that the library staff are thrilled about any of that.

I thank Byron, Andrew, and the contributors for their excellent work.

technological determinism objection has become fashionable or even old hat, a stock answer anytime the lid comes off the box. . . . many objections to determinism thus arise from a misperception that any attention paid to the material construction and use of a technology automatically amounts to “hard” determinism, an extreme position that technology arises and evolves of its own volition, carrying humans away like the ebbing tide.

I’m reminded of a similar qualification: Stuart Hall’s remark that poststructural approaches to determination often mistakenly shatter the base-superstructure relationship, assuming “necessarily no correspondence” between them, when “no necessary correspondence” is a far better representation. Similarly, acknowledging the influence of hardware doesn’t mean that influence is rigid and absolute, or that concerns with hardware trump all others. You could substitute “technology” for “hardware” here, I think.

Bogost and Montfort also argue for increased awareness of code, of programming, of the nuts and bolts of computing, but not at the expense of the traditional aims of the humanities. Again, I’ve long agreed with this sort of thinking:

the time has come for digital media scholars, and particularly the ones still undertaking their formal education, to learn more about the ways computer hardware and software are designed and programmed. … To greatly emphasize such training could even be detrimental to the particular interests of the digital media scholar, who also needs a deep engagement with the humanities. But just as the serious scholar of film might choose to learn about film production in order to understand the methods by which his chosen medium is created, and a serious scholar of the book might study bibliography, printing processes and technologies, and how binding and paper-making is done, so the serious scholar of digital media might need to delve deeper into the material construction of software and hardware.

The extensive analogies to film and books imply there’s a good bit of persuasive work left to be done. I’m not so sure that’s the case. Regardless, the next time I need to make either of these arguments, here’s a nice place to turn.

First, on context, to pick up on Alex’s comments about Cortland, what if we shift the ground from research universities to institutions where teaching is the primary mission? While I don’t want to tune my response by saying “That’s not what happens here,” it’s hard not to think students for whom the MA is a terminal degree would respond very differently to the survey. For instance, Derek’s diagrams would be very different with “thesis” substituted for “dissertation”–two years of coursework, not four; none of the deep, focused reading preceding doctoral examinations, etc. Given that non-research institutions dominate American higher education, from comprehensives like Cortland and Western to community colleges, I see a pedagogical imperative even more broadly operant than Kopelson. And it is powerful enough to reverse the field: instead of compelling students to add a pedagogy chapter or “pedagesture,” I often have to encourage (even force) them to think outside the pedagogical box. Kopelson’s call for broadening “pedagogical” is hard to argue with: I think I could live with the pedagogical imperative if it wasn’t at its heart an first-year composition imperative.

And the conclusion. Disappointing for a few reasons. First and foremost, I’m an “eat your own dog food” kind of fellow, and it just doesn’t make sense for Kopelson to end in this manner. There’s a huge difference between an essay like hers and narcissistic edited collections which tell “stories of the discipline” (read: here’s how we do it at Whatever SU). Second, yes, some folks (heck, whole university presses) are entrapped in “endlessly recycled debates,” but it’s not hard to find scholars who aren’t, following the borrowing and/or rhetorical models she presents. I’d like to think that my borrowing from user-centered design, computer science, library science, etc. is productive, even if it doesn’t create a true interdisciplinarity. So I’m just gonna strike out that last paragraph.

I wish the book had gotten a little deeper into the particulars of the “smart” alternatives to the “dumbing” which Johnson takes on. I wanted to hear more about narrative complexity and specifics about the problem-solving encouraged by gameplay. In particular, I’m also interested in the research work implied in the more sophisticated responses to media. There’s obvious evidence for Johnson’s claim that aficionados of Lost and other contemporary media are using the web to learn more about their favorite shows; I’d wanted to hear a bit more. Same with the question of anti-intellectualism which Alex brought up recently; though I haven’t read Jacoby’s book, I agree with Alex’s diagnosis of much charges of anti-intellectualism (or heck any perceived social ill) as a mix of bad logic and navel-gazing: “I do X, and I am smart. You aren’t interested in X, so you must a moron.” But not appearing “too smart” remains desirable, and disengagement (or at least its appearance) still appeals for many reasons. Still, I see it as playing dumb, rather than being dumb.

Turns out my timing wasn’t too bad; Mark Bauerlein has turned his attention from CCCC programs to many of the questions Johnson takes on. Has anyone read The Dumbest Generation? Frankly, I’m not excited about buying it, and it’s too new for ILL. I did finally get Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, which I started last year but didn’t finish. That will have to do until I decide if Bauerlein gets any of my money.

Distance: runs over 7 miles in red.

Pace: runs slower than 9:00/mi in red; faster than 8:20/mi in green. Scale from 6:30 to 10:00/mi.

So, yes. Last Friday, I ran a half-marathon in 1:53 (8:36/mi), a touch slower than my personal best. And I was very surprised today when I ran 8 miles in 1:00:45 (7:36/mi).

I created the sparklines with Joe Gregorio’s generator and edited them a bit to cut out the “zero” points and highlight the fastest runs in green. Data source: my running journal.

Edit 02/14: Here’s another sparkline which combines the two; I’ve changed the color of the long runs to blue, since that isn’t “bad” like the slow runs.

Edit 03/05: Updating to add in a few more weeks of data. See the big gap when I was sick? Trying black main data now; red for slow (9:00/mi or slower) and green for fast (under 8:00/mi).

Beautiful Evidence introduces the idea of sparklines: “Why not also construct data graphics that work at the resolution of routine typography? Thus the idea of sparklines: small, intense, wordlike graphics” (48). Examples include medical, financial, and sport data (for example, the win-loss history for a baseball season). Here’s the federal budget deficit from 1993 to 2003: On the one hand, I’m very hip to this. But on the other, they often seem too small. High-resolution display of information doesn’t equal information delivery. As Tufte points out, paper can deliver hundreds of data points in the space of a word, and we can certainly perceive it (that’s how we quickly differentiate typefaces). But that doesn’t mean it’s possible to make meaningful use of very small graphics. I think Tufte’s suggestion to consider sparklines as fractals plays well; each should link to larger, ideally interactive graphics of the same data. In practice, this is less difficult than it sounds, since for a display of multiple sparklines like this one only one software implementation is needed. Indeed, several software implementations of sparklines have appeared; the one above is generated using a PHP library, and this Python-based generator includes a web interface.

“Words, Numbers, Images—Together” looks at several classical works (e.g. Galileo’s Starry Messenger) which integrated image and text heavily. Why isn’t this more common today? Tufte points out digital tools discourage it–we use different programs to store data, create graphics from it, and integrate those graphics in text. Today few books emulate top-notch field guides, which show “a sense of craft, detail, and credibility that comes from gathering and displaying good evidence all together” regardless of its textual, pictorial, or graphical nature (115). And as we know, our curricula discourage it, too.

Beautiful Evidence goes on the offensive in two chapters which read like a unit, “Corruption in Evidence Presentations” and “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.” The latter updates the 2005 pamphlet “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” an all-out assault on PowerPoint which includes criticism of PowerPoint slides related to the 2003 loss of the shuttle Columbia. Many readers have focused on the shortcomings of PowerPoint, which for Tufte epitomizes the modern software corporation, a bureaucracy focused on programming and marketing (161). Yes, the information density is abysmal, the typography nearly unreadable, and the AutoContent wizard encourages changing the message to fit the template (all flaws Tufte discusses). But Tufte also shows that PowerPoint presentations replace technical reports followed by discussion, best summarized by the IBM anecdote which leads off the chapter, where Lou Gerstner cut off a formal presentation and said, “Let’s just talk about your business.” PowerPoint is replacement for discussion of literature, following on the heels of other presentation, meeting, or teaching formats which replace talking about reading. Eliminating PowerPoint wouldn’t eliminate the problem, which is cultural, as the loss of two shuttles and fourteen astronauts painfully shows. What underlies the problem PowerPoint? Failure to consider complexity; the drive to find a simple, conclusive answer, often via secondary or tertiary repackaging of information.

However, some material just doesn’t seem to fit. The chapter on sculpture pedestals and the accompanying photo essay are interesting, but I just don’t see the connection to evidentiary matters. Tufte also recycles examples, reading Minard’s Grand Army graphic to extrapolate six principles of analytical design. This would be very useful as a standalone pamphlet, or a nice way to epitomize Tufte in a course pack, but for folks familiar with Tufte, it feels like a retread. Beautiful Evidence has many valuable insights, but I don’t see a book’s worth–at least not a book as powerful as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, still by far Tufte’s best.

Side note: Tufte has updated his list of courses for 2008. I’ve signed up for the Thu Jun 19 course in Chicago.

I’m very, very glad to say I’m reading a fair amount these days. I’m halfway through a second reading of Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, which has some very good bits. Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New is next, and for fun Shipley and Schwalbe’s Send: An Essential Guide to Email. Reading shall lead to writing. Last year I abandoned an essay, missing a deadline because I realized (while trying to write) that I was rehashing tired old stuff. Better to bail than to suck. Even better to get back in the groove. To that end, I’ve started hashing out the spec for the database work I want to do with Composition Forum, and I’ve been working more to wrap my head around XML and XSLT.

My college has finished interviews for our technology manager, and my department is about halfway through campus visits for the three positions we have open. I’ve attended a lot of the sessions, which has been alternately exhausting and exciting: the former simply because of the time required, the latter because we’ve had some excellent candidates.

Erin has started intensive work on the kitchen; she blasted paint off trim last week, and I started prepping the windows for replacement. Our plan is one step under total renovation; we’ll keep the existing cabinets (we hate ‘em, but don’t want to spend $5K to replace them) and the appliances (all functional). Everything else goes: counters, sink, nasty green paint, crappy lighting. We’re also going to set up some shelves downstairs so we can keep some less often used appliances and stuff in the basement, freeing up cabinet space to get things off the counters. Anyone with experience in kitchen optimization?

Madelyn is in all-day day care two days a week–Tuesday and Thursday, my teaching days. So far so good; she’s adjusted to napping at school pretty well, though she doesn’t nap as long as she does at home. Actually, she doesn’t nap as long at home as she used to, either. Madelyn has been nursing a cough for a while, but that hasn’t slowed her down much. Yesterday we went sledding at the reservoir (big hill on the dam side) then saw the Amtrak pick up Chicago-bound folks. Tomorrow is a playdate with Claire and lunch with the writing group; that’s always fun.

As Glenn wrote, Madelyn also had fun last week when Glenn and MB made the trip down from Iowa. We had some very good beer (I especially liked the Avery IPA), and Erin went nuts in the kitchen, making fantastic bread and butternut squash soup. She followed that with a pancake and spinach frittata breakfast. A side visit to a birthday party was fun, too. If only the snow had come a bit earlier…

We got a pretty good snowfall Thursday night; I took a few shots with the shutter open a while (at right, and a few more on Flickr). Pretty cool. We are supposed to get a lot more ice and snow today before it warms up to 50° tomorrow. I believe the snow part, since it’s just started snowing like mad (and we’ve even had a few thunderclaps). But I don’t see the temperature going up. Quite the reverse. I guess it’s possible; last Thursday we went from 59 to 19 in four hours.

So far I’ve kept up with my plan to run three times a week in ’08. And I’m hip to using Google Docs to track my runs. Last night’s run put me over 100 miles for the year. I’ve never tracked my runs consistently enough to know how long that took. Kinda cool. And today I saw a nice speed bump: 5K in 21:56. I wanted to run on the outdoor track, since I can pace much better that way, but the lazy #!(@% at Macomb High are apparently afraid of snow–the track hadn’t been cleared! So I settled for Compton Park, which is a little more than a half-mile loop. I started too fast and had to back off after about 3.5K. But heck, I still broke 22:00.

Go Giants.

Jakob Nielsen is the 800lb gorilla of usability, at least where the web is concerned. Why?

• Academics like him because of publications like Usability Engineering (1993), which uses a definition of usability accompanied with research into testing and application.
• Nerds like him because of his readable, practical, quotable web site. Generally speaking, Nielsen’s advice also clicks with nerdly values: substance over glitz, get the job done, follow standards, share your research.
• Writing for the web has set the standards for web writing. I’ve seen it cited or clearly influenced all over the place, from composition texts to online tutorials.

This preface leads me to Nielsen and Hoa Loranger’s book Prioritizing Web Usability, which updates the seminal Designing Web Usability. The update begins with a review of Nielsen’s early web usability work which summarizes changes in web use since the mid 1990s, and moves into a list of best practices for designing web sites (for example, making a search engine results page, or integrating multimedia).

Theoretically, I find few big changes from DWU. Nielsen & Loranger focus on “business goals,” which they argue can apply to non-profits, government agencies, and the like. But the sites and tasks in the case studies make it clear the focus is e-commerce–products, navigation, and other elements all focus on e-commerce sites of some kind. This is also reflected a simple definition of usability, as opposed to the multi-part definitions typical of Nielsen and other usability specialists (for example, Whitney Quesenbery’s 5Es). As was the case in Designing Web Usability, simplicity is most important for Nielsen & Loranger. Second is convention: as Nielsen wrote in 1999, they advise following standard practices whenever possible, from GUI widgets to the use of previews and navigation design.

This focus makes Prioritizing Web Usability less broadly useful than it might otherwise have been. For example, usability guidelines for page layout echo design principles of proximity and alignment, and call on examples from corporate web site front pages and shopping carts. But there is little discussion of other kinds of pages or sites, and discussion of the practices Nielsen & Loranger recommend is often very brief. Add to this the lack of methodological content, and the end result is somewhat typical of Nielsen’s Useit.com: a teaser for more expensive reports fron NN/g. I found myself repeatedly asking, “Ok, but what about a different kind of web site?” The lack of attention to method is understandable (focus) but at times I find the book more a loose collection of examples than a coherent argument. Still, I welcome the research-based approach, especially the debunking of old saws like the three-click rule or “chunk all your pages,” and the repeated calls for user testing and user-oriented design in general. Never enough of that, in my mind.

Crystal charts the history of what might be called English punditry, the all-too-common prescriptive approach to language change, orthography, grammar, syntax… you name it. Though it’s an Oxford title, this isn’t an Academic Book; citations are usually indirect, it reads very quickly, and chapters are very short. On the one hand, this is what I’ve been seeking: a book for students who don’t know the history of grammar–the story behind rules such as “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”–or even that there can be multiple approaches to grammar. On the other hand, I wanted some of the connections to academic texts to be more flushed out. The short chapters got to me after a while; they seemed forced, like commercial breaks on shows made for PBS. (In fact, the book might have been developed this way; Crystal is a frequent contributor to BBC radio.)

However, the book’s structure is decidedly academic. Crystal doesn’t really hit his argument until chapter 18 of 30, when he writes:

The prescriptive grammarians went out of their way to invent as many rules as possible which might distinguish polite from impolite speech. They didn’t find very many–just a few dozen [...]. But these rules were propounded with maximum authority and severity, and given plausibility by the claim that they were going to help people to be clear and precise. As a result, generations of schoolchildren would be taught them, and be confused by them. (122)

Crystal calls this failed promise of prescriptive grammar “the big con,” arguing instead for an approach to grammar which teaches grammar and syntax simultaneously, and acknowledges the complexity of language and linguistic change. Tossing grammar completely in the 1970s was a mistake, and a careful restoration is needed. Sound familiar? Hopefully. Though Crystal doesn’t connect his pedagogy to American writing studies explicitly, he does comment extensively on its implementation in the British National Curriculum for English.

Alert readers will recognize a reference to Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots, and Leaves in Crystal’s subtitle. While he does take up Truss’s “zero tolerance approach” in several instances, he doesn’t attack her work and in the end seems mostly puzzled by it. Crystal also mentions, rather disdainfully, an Australian television program which tried to set up a sort of confrontation between he and Truss. Instead, his vitriol is reserved for Lindley Murray and his ilk. As with Truss, Crystal is careful to show the complexity, if any, in the work of 18th and 19th century grammarians.

The Fight for English provides broadly accessible support for a descriptivist approach to teaching writing, especially grammar, mechanics, syntax, etc. I find myself needing this type of commonplace most often when I deal with students over the traditional age, many of whom expect a Miss Thistlebottom approach to writing. But it also happens with my colleagues, both in and out of my department.