Blogs

The folks over at BROG (Blog Research on Genre) have a new essay out that I've been meaning to post about for a few days now called "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up.'" The abstract:

The "blogosphere" has been claimed to be a densely interconnected
conversation, with bloggers linking to other
bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and posting
comments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations
have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known as
the 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent
to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected,
taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs.
Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of link
patterns, and qualitative analysis of references and
comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show that
A-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the
network, although other groupings of blogs are more
densely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of
blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample,
suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected
and sporadically conversational.

And research questions:

1) How interlinked is the blogosphere from the perspective
of a random blog?

1a) Which blogs are central?

1b) Which blogs are more interconnected? Are
there cliques?

1c) Is the blogosphere a "small world"?

2) Do other types of "conversation" take place between
linked blogs, and if so, to what extent?

To put it another way (if I understand them correctly) could any random blog on Blogger (nice that they've turned the whole system into one big blog ring instead of putting those ads at the top) potentially lead to this blog right here, given many degrees of separation, of course? Worth a look.

Today I bought a toning band and some ankle weights, because, you know, it's not like I have enough exercise equipment or anything. I'd been playing around with the band for a little while, doing thigh abductors and other moves, and I eventually held it like this. All of a sudden I was overcome with the desire to shoot a bow and arrow. I used to go to a month-long summer camp when I was a child, and that's where I was first introduced to archery (how I loved that place...I have to go back there someday and just walk around and take it all in). I fell in love with it and have enjoyed it ever since, when I've had the opportunity to do it. I wonder if there are any places here in the Twin Cities where I could practice archery without the expectation that I'll become all hardcore about it, hunting animals and entering competitions and such?

UPDATE: Here I am in my cabin at Camp DeSoto; this was taken my second summer there. I'll bet I had just left archery class, which explains the grin:

The girls were organized into tribes, and each tribe wore t-shirts in specific colors: green for Chickasaw, blue for Creek, and red for Cherokee. I, obviously, was a Cherokee.

What book(s) would you write if you weren't so busy doing your scholarship, teaching, and the 150 million other things you have to do every day? Here's one I've been turning over in my mind for about three years now. Maybe someone else will write it; I hope so. This requires some background, so bear with me.

In a couple of weeks, I will be thirty years old. :O I grew up in the 70s and 80s and, because I have excellent parents who read to me for as long as I wanted them to, every single day, running their index fingers along the words as they spoke them,

(not like that LeapFrog "magic wand" that the kids can use to point to a word and hear a recorded voice speak it -- every time I see those LeapPads in the toy aisles of Target or Wal-Mart, I get depressed...it doesn't compare to the intellectual stimulation of having a human being point to the word and say it to the child. I know it's so hard to find the time to read to children as much as both parents and children want, and I don't intend to make any parents feel bad; I only want to point out that I was very lucky to have enormous amounts of time -- and money, what with all the book clubs my parents joined: it seemed that every day, new books arrived in the mail -- invested in my development)

I learned to read before I turned three. After that, my parents had to pull the books out of my hands when they wanted me to pay attention to some non-book-related thing. "Stop reading and eat," they'd scold. I far preferred books to toys, and I read everything. Now, when I bring up childhood reading experiences with women my age, we talk about characters in those 70s and 80s books, like Nancy Drew, Bess, George, Elizabeth Wakefield, Jessica Wakefield, Lila Fowler, Enid Rollins, Bruce Patman, Todd Wilkins, Ramona Quimby, Beezus Quimby, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sisters Mary and Carrie, Caitlin Ryan, the Girls of Canby Hall, Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace of A Wrinkle in Time, Ned of Jelly Belly, Tony of Then Again, Maybe I Won't, Linda Fischer of Blubber, and Margaret of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, as though they were old friends. We felt these characters, knew them intimately. They inspired us. We looked at how they handled the situations we found ourselves in, listened to their interpretations of such experiences as first kisses, menarche, getting bullied or standing there doing nothing when someone we liked was getting bullied because we were too afraid to take up for our friend, and we knew we weren't alone in our self-doubt and awkwardness. When I say "we," of course, I mean white, middle-class girls; it speaks volumes that the only book I remember reading about a working-class African-American family was Striped Ice Cream.

I'd love to interview a bunch of women of all races and classes, to record their memories of these characters and what kinds of effects (constructive? alienating?) they had on these women, and then write a book about to what extent and how these books have shaped femininity in my generation.

Via What It Is Today, a mosaic of the soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. I might bring it into class when we talk about visual arguments. It's a provocative image, raising such obvious questions as: Is it too simplistic? Is it exploitative? Is it ethical to use all of these soldiers' faces? Many of them were likely earnest supporters of the war. What questions at issue and arguments does it raise about why we're at war?

Edited to move image to the "read more" area.

Any ideas on what I can do with this yarn? It's all merino wool except the two skeins on the right, which are ballet yarn. I've earmarked the red merino wool (I have more of it than what's pictured here) for a scarf and hat set...for myself! I never knit anything for myself, but that's all about to change. This isn't my whole stash of yarn, by the way; I have much more. :) Right now, I'm working on three projects: a baby blanket, the red hat/scarf set, and my first-ever felting project, a big oven mitt, made out of forest green wool yarn.

Via Rana comes The Infinite Cat Project. It's too cute. My favorite is Cheesedoodle:

Aaaaawwww!

The EDUCAUSE Information Resources Library has fairly recently created a weblog category focused on the use of weblogs in education. A lot of people contact me asking for these kinds of sources, so now I have one handy link to send. :)

In the last few days, there's been some good, thought-provoking discussion of the CCCC review process. The posts, in order: Jeff, Jenny, Jenny, Collin, Jenny, Jeff. Jenny, Jeff, and Collin are critiquing the conference for its tendency to accept panels on the same topics every year (service learning, plagiarism, "what I do in my classroom"), and while CCCC still presents a good opportunity to socialize, it lacks intellectual force and vitality, due in part to the review process. I agree, and I've heard others express similar frustration. I've been thinking about the panels I attend at Cs, and as one would expect, I attend panels based on my interests: technology (especially blogs and wikis), feminist rhetorics, and intellectual property. During blocks of time when no panels on these topics are offered, I usually attend the Featured Session with Great Big Name or a history of rhetoric panel or sessions on subjects I don't know much about, such as high-stakes testing or environmental rhetoric. Sometimes I attend friends' presentations just to be a friendly face in the audience, but it's rare (I know! I'm terrible!).

My point is, I, too, flip through the program and see many sessions that elicit the response, "absolutely not." And that's a problem. The proposal Jenny, Jeff, and Geoff had submitted sounds very exciting to me: writing the city, and each person had planned to talk about his or her city (Austin, Detroit, Minneapolis) and their students' engagement with these cities. This is important work, intersecting with geography and cultural studies, scholarship that not only presents a challenge to the ways writing is being taught, but also challenges disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps that's one problem with Cs; for a long time, scholars in rhetoric and composition have struggled to establish rhetoric and composition as a discipline, to procure legitimacy for it, and now that rhet/comp enjoys a status above fledgling (or does it? Taking the long view, I must admit it's no psychology, sociology, or anthropology.), the program chairs and reviewers want to hold our position? I'm not trying to suggest that program chairs and reviewers consciously think this, only that the impulse toward disciplinary coherence is strong, and proposals on new, unfamiliar topics might be at a disadvantage for this reason.

My view here is informed by Berkenkotter and Huckin's (1995) research; Collin, Jeff, and Jenny's posts inspired me to pull my copy of Genre Knowledge off the shelf and re-read the "Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention" chapter, which is all about 4Cs. In the chapter, Berkenkotter and Huckin interpret data from a longitudinal corpus study of a total of 441 4Cs abstracts from 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1992. They've got a lot to say, as you might expect, and I'm not going to go over it all in detail here. They comment on rhet/comp's status as a discipline:

Rhetoric and composition is a highly interdisciplinary field, not yet a true discipline unto itself, and the theme statements from recent CCCC conventions, including some we have not covered in this study, all reflect this fact. It is a field made up of diverse elements and interests, held together in an ever-changing constellation. But there seem to be at least three constants in the field: training in literary/humanistic studies, a commitment to pedagogy, and an interest in grounded (situated) research. (p. 114)

They provide some history of the conference, specifically that it started in 1949 and instituted blind review in 1992, and some details about the review process. They corroborate John's comments on Jeff's first post that the program chair has a great deal of authority and can not only, as John says, accept a proposal rejected by the reviewers, but also reject a proposal accepted by the reviewers. At the time of the study, reviewers were required to give each abstract a 1 (Weak), 2 (Adequate), 3 (Good), or 4 (Excellent). Berkenkotter and Huckin add, "A high score makes it likely that the paper will be included in the program, but does not guarantee it: Other factors, such as a balance of topics, broad geographical representation, and the program chair's particular interests, can intervene" (p. 97). The procedure may not be the same now, but Berkenkotter and Huckin's analysis of the criteria for acceptance stands. They point out that the reviewers look for topics "of current interest to active, experienced members of the rhetoric and composition community," a clearly defined problem, a framing of the problem "in a way that would be seen by experienced insiders as novel and therefore interesting," and "an insider ethos through the use of terminology, special topoi, and/or explicit or implicit references to the scholarly literature" (p. 102).

I find the "novelty" criterion to be the most germane to the critique being made here. It would seem the reviewers don't want groundbreaking research; they only want analysis that slightly extends existing scholarship and maintains disciplinary cohesion. The example Berkenkotter and Huckin provide is a high-rated proposal from 1990 on the concept of voice, which Berkenkotter and Huckin call "a timeworn topic familiar to all compositionists" (p. 110). The author of the proposal addresses the Derridean critique (and the critics) of "voice" and attempts to reconcile it with the position of those who are invested in "voice" as a pedagogically useful concept. She makes a distinction between using the term "voice" warily, which is good, and nervously, which is undesirable and unnecessary. Basically, they want novelty with a little n, not a big N. :)

I hope to find out what others think about the 4Cs review process. Do you think the review process is in need of reform? Collin, in his post, offers what I think is a superb idea: Establish a database of reviewers who truly are experts in their particular areas, instead of simply being friends with the program chair. It's a no-brainer, really; it would make the program chair's job easier, it would make the process fairer for the applicants, and it would improve the overall quality of the scholarship at the conference. Should we go even further and rethink the whole conference? Jenny reflects,

I almost like the idea of making it a huge conference of SIGs and letting the paper/panel model die. Maybe we could just propose and add our names to four or five SIGs and attend those. Everyone and anyone could participate in at least one SIG (thereby getting that all important "name on the program") and attend all the others you want.

You know, that's the way they did it at last year's BloggerCon, and by all accounts, it was great. Daisy might have some comments on this model, having attended BloggerCon.

UPDATE: Collin and Steve have follow-up posts well worth reading.