In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts
- I got my college's nomination to apply for an NEH Summer Stipend. Hurrah!, but that means I have to finish this daunting proposal by midnight tomorrow night. I have a Big Idea for the project, book-length even, and I'm having to repeat the title of this post in order to take myself seriously. A sidebar: I first encountered that quotation while reading selections from Emerson in college, and it was like a flash of lightning.
- To build on this point, I really want to use Cmap to map out these ideas, but the program has become SO SLOW. It freezes up every time I try to use it. This didn't happen when I was concept-mapping my dissertation; what has changed? [UPDATE: It's a little less slow now, but I'm still wary.]
- I think more conferences in my field (and other fields!) should publish conference proceedings online. Most of the conferences I attend don't even do conference proceedings. Maybe if they did, the general quality of presentations would be better, as people would strive to make theirs good enough to be chosen for the proceedings. Last year, the New Media Research at UMN conference organizers talked about doing something like that -- a white paper about the state of new media research at the university, published online. But presenters got skittish, complaining that having their whole papers out there online might hurt their chances of having the papers published in journals. If the proceedings were online, the conference organizers could make the most of the medium and use digital video, podcasting, etc. At the same time, I appreciate the value of a well-edited text-based proceedings, and at any rate one should have a text-only version for the deaf and hearing-impaired.
I guess that's the main barrier -- the "but what if this mows down my chances to get this into a journal" objection. Also, it would be a lot more work for the conference organizers, or whatever committee would be appointed to evaluate the presentations. Would it be worth if it upped the quality of the presentations and preparedness of the presenters (full papers, or heck, even longer abstracts of, say, 1000 words would have to be presented before the conference in order to be considered for the proceedings) across the board, though? I know I've heard plenty of people in composition studies make the argument that it would be nice if papers were required ahead of time, to cut down on the "I wrote this on the plane!" effect. Maybe it would be good to do a pilot project like this with a smaller conference.
Comments
Congratulations on the
Congratulations on the nomination, Clancy. That's really great.