I have a dog now. He came with the soon-to-be husband.

Did all of you already know about feministing.org, a rather regrettable parody of the actual feministing? I can't believe I've only just now happened upon it (via Ilyka Damen).

Right now I'm in the process of frantically revising chapters. Revisions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 are due to my advisor very soon, and chapters 1 and 3 are what need the most work in the whole thing, sigh.

I wrote my literature review a long time ago; I guess I've been writing it for years now: in seminar papers, preliminary exams, etc. What I need to do now is organize it in a clean, streamlined way in order to make broad claims about the body of research -- which is, in this case, work with gender and technology in composition studies.

Throughout the process of writing my dissertation, I've sometimes had these leaps in my thinking, these "why didn't I think of this two years ago?" ideas. Last night, as I was revising my chapter, I had one. I decided to take all the articles, books, and book chapters I'm reviewing and put them in a spreadsheet. I have only five columns: Author, Year, Category, Theory, and Method. I'm categorizing these essays according to what the authors are doing and/or talking about. My categories, which are subheadings in my literature review, are:

Classroom Research

The Body in Cyberspace (remember all those pieces that were published in the late 1990s? Almost all used some theoretical combination of Stone, Haraway, Foucault, and Turkle)

Hypertext as Écriture Féminine

Girl Culture Online

Professional Space (women's professional web sites)

These categories pretty much cover most of the research that's been done. Perhaps some of you have already had the idea to do a literature review spreadsheet, but I thought I'd share it anyway. I think it will help me to be as comprehensive as possible. It'll also be nice to sort the data by year, category, or any other heading.

Edited: Immediately after hitting "Submit," I thought of another column: Technology. I realized I wanted to keep track of whether the technology being studied was email, a bulletin board, a MOO, what have you.

The new issue of KB Journal addresses Burke and ecocriticism. I know that those of you who are interested in ecocriticism will want to check out the articles, but that's not the only reason why I linked there. I want to call your attention to a couple of other cool things: first (and this must have been done quietly, without making a big fuss), all articles in KB Journal are now Creative Commons licensed. Second, I'm really impressed with the quality of the commentary on the articles there. They've got a small, but extremely thoughtful and articulate, group of folks who comment on the articles, a group which includes the astute Tom Wright. The comments there are not so much like blog comments, but more serious, like the correspondence I expect Burke, Marianne Moore, etc. would have engaged in upon reading each new issue of The Dial.

I've been thinking a lot lately about style guides after this post of Nels' and some conversations I've been having. My own experience with style guides started in high school, with the de rigueur research paper, using MLA style. At the time, our teachers treated MLA like a religion. We had to bring our MLA handbooks to class every day, and we pulled our desks together in circles and had long discussions about how the title of a book was underlined, but the period after the title WAS NOT underlined, etc. I did everything I was supposed to do, without having any idea why, what the meaning was, or even what the letters "MLA" stood for. Eventually I learned, and everything was fine.

Then, at about the end of my master's program/beginning of my PhD program, I was encouraged to use APA instead. As with MLA style, there was no clearly stated rationale for using APA, but I did it anyway. Now I use APA pretty much all the time; I have it internalized as I used to have MLA style. I've even forgotten a good bit about MLA style.

There are implications here, of course. The choice of style guide is an identification maneuver, especially the choice between MLA, thoroughly ensconced in the humanities, and APA, unambiguously social scientific. I never wished to align myself with the social sciences (not that there's anything wrong with those, and moreover, I've heard it comes in handy to make your research look social scientific for grant applications), so now I want to make an informed decision about what my new default style guide is going to be. So let's analyze this; what are the advantages of using MLA? APA? I'm starting a list of the journals in my field(s) organized by style guide, and I hope you'll add to it:

APA

Community Literacy

Computers and Composition

TCQ

MLA

College English

JAC

CCC

Enculturation

Whatever Style You Want

Kairos

I'd also like to include specific series in rhetoric and composition published by university presses.

But there's more to be said about the affordances and aesthetics of each style guide. Like Nels, I prefer that all the words in titles are capitalized, and I don't like the omission of authors' first names in APA, either. I'm not crazy about IMRAD format for research papers, which I've been encouraged to use at times and which APA format espouses. I guess the only thing I like about APA is the dates in citations and the appreciation of placing research in a chronology. I like to be able to see multiple citations in one parenthesis, a survey of the research on a given topic at a glance. That parenthesis tells me quickly how many articles/books have been written on a particular topic, how far back in time the research goes, and when the most recent work has been done. I guess I could do a similar chronology in MLA, though, but in a more narrative form.

What are your thoughts on style guides? I know I've only scratched the surface here. I especially want to hear from those of you who have used several different style guides (notice Chicago isn't even here yet).

We are going to be getting married pretty soon:

I haven't read through it yet, but the new issue of Scholar & Feminist Online looks fantastic. Those interested in biography, autobiography, and Carolyn Heilbrun's work should head over there. TOC follows:

Part 1: Carolyn and Columbia
Opening Remarks, by Jean E. Howard
Carol and Columbia, by Joan Ferrante
The Power and Joy of Being Difficult, by Ann Douglas
The Life of the Author, by Margaret Vandenburg
Out of the Academy and Into the World with Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Video, CUNY 1992

Part 2: Academics and Their Memoirs
Just Writing (A Feminist's Life), by Marianne Hirsch
Walking (Even Now) with Carolyn, by Mary Ann Caws
Memoir and Academics, by Charlotte Pierce-Baker
Teaching/Depression, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
The Age Difference, by Nancy K. Miller
Not an Academic Memoir, by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
If Only, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed

Part 3: Conference Comments and Conversations
Video with Text Transcripts

Part 4: Coda
Reading in the Waiting Room, by Susan Gubar
Missed Connections/Mourning Carolyn Heilbrun, by Susan Winnett