cbd

I recently traveled to Chicago for excellent beer and a course by Edward Tufte.

Everyone else on the planet has probably read it already, but I’ve finished my first read of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You. I like Johnson’s stuff (I fancy this this comment about an update of Interface Culture both a compliment and dead on). I read the endnotes before reading the book so [...]

Catch-all: strawberries, cleaning, accessibility internship, writing a review

Crossposted with a few email lists…
A colleague and I are putting together a panel on readymades, and we’re looking for a third presenter. Broadly speaking, we’re looking at the re-emergence of the readymade in a variety of forms: web-based templates and assemblages, even textbooks like the recently discussed TS/IS.
If you’re interested, drop me a line. [...]

James Twitchell gets busted for plagiarism.

Our graduate committee recently finished the paperwork for a comprehensive revision of our graduate program. “Update” is an understatement. The old curriculum was state of the art around 1970. Maybe 1870. Coursework covered three areas: British Literature, British Literature, and Other. The roster of courses long abandoned would be funny if it wasn’t pathetic.
We’re replacing [...]

RIP Networked Writing Environment: 1995-2008

Beer leads to more publishing: clearly, Jeff’s secret!

Some very strong projects this year in both the Style course and Computers & Writing:

Nascent standup comedian Ryan Budds created a site to promote himself, nicely integrating Flickr, Google Calendar, YouTube, and traditional web pages.
Lora Carmichael wrote a conference presentation which provides methods for teaching writing style to high school students, asserting that it [...]

Commentary on David Crystal’s The Fight for English (Oxford 2007), a history of and argument against prescriptive views of English.