Blogs

For most of us, the days of long and leisurely summer vacations are likely over. But after a long spring semester, how are we supposed to rest up for our work during the summer and fall? The summer months offer a great opportunity to reflect on the past academic year and reenergize for the year ahead. Here are a few things you can do to recharge your mind, body, and spirit, whether you have a day, a week, or the entire summer.

When you teach a course for which the prerequisite is “permission of instructor,” on what do you base the decision to grant or withhold permission?

When I saw Scott Jaschik’s piece today about unhappy associate professors, my first thought was, haven’t we already discussed this? Well, yes, we have! Apparently associate professors have been “standing still” for quite some time—at least since the MLA released its report on the rank in 2009, and probably longer.

Yes, I'm late to the party, but my first day at DHSI has taught me that, yes, encoding a document in TEI is an act of critical scholarship.

Every time that I fork over $229.50 to renew my Platinum membership plan at Audible (an Amazon company) I like to mark the occasion and think some about the meaning of this purchase.

I recently finished The Information Diet, and I felt that the metaphor was the most powerful part of this book. Johnson's assertions that our current informational climate serves us up cheap fillers in the way of celebrity news and downright unhealthy partisan rhetoric rang true for me. I have long been concerned about the issue of the Filter Bubble in which all the data that Google, Facebook, and more are collecting about us lead to all the algorithms only showing me what it thinks I want to see. Johnson's Information Diet is a call to action against this and many other informational ills perpetuated by our networked consumption. The challenge issued is to approach consumption of all media in the same way we might approach healthy eating: recognize what is junk and stop consuming it.

Is it time for a 'global common data set' for world university rankers?http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20101125183129588

My dissertation director died recently, and thanks to my proximity to New York I was able to attend his memorial service. A series of moving tributes from family and colleagues amplified what I already knew to be true about him: he was a committed teacher, an immensely learned and generous scholar, and he was always and constantly those things, whether lecturing at the local public library on the classics or leading graduate students through the labyrinth of Finnegans Wake.