Blogging

You might have noticed that I've added a link at the top of the site to my essays, research, and conference notes. It's something I've been meaning to do for some time now; I was thinking that if anyone came here only wanting to see my essays and representations of my research interests, a portal to those would be in order so that sifting through everything in the Rhetoric and Feminism categories wouldn't be necessary. I've been admiring Andrew's "Recent Essays" section of his sidebar and Anne's research section for ages, and finally I've done my own. I'm still working on it; I probably need to break it down into shorter essays and longer essays in each category, and I think I'll take a cue from Anne and include an abstract (or annotation for the shorter essays) of each piece. I also need to put them in some order--chronological, reverse chronological, or alphabetical. Come to think of it, this is a great opportunity for me to write a statement of my research agenda.


Edited to add: I meant for this to be a request for feedback. How do you think I should arrange the work here? Would you like to see it divided into short essays/long essays, rather than rhetoric and feminism? Reverse chronological? What?

Tomorrow I leave for the GPACW conference, and I have finally finished my presentation. This time, I used Drupal's collaborative book module, which made the whole thing much more wieldy and easier to edit. Below is the table of contents:

• Introduction: The Call for Critical Studies of Genre
• Normalization in Higher Education
• The Deployment of Disciplinary Power in The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Invisible Adjunct and Heteroglossia
• Institutional Reform
• Conclusion: Weblogs and Change
• References

I cut a lot, but I still need to cut more (for my oral presentation--the version here will remain as is). Guess I'll be doing that in the hotel tomorrow night.

The new issue of thirdspace on Representation and Transgressive Sexualities just went live, and now they're featuring PDFs of each issue; Laura Gurak has noted that we're seeing this trend of both PDF versions and html versions in electronic publishing because if it looks like print, it's better for a tenure portfolio. She chalks it up to the fact that we're in a state of transition right now in terms of academic publishing.

Another cool little thing...I received an email from the program coordinator of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society's Internet Law Program May 13-15. Apparently I am one of a group of bloggers they're inviting to the program with a tuition waiver (the tuition is $1995, but for me it technically would have been $895 since I'm a student--hey, either way it's free). I'm excited about the opportunity to learn more about internet law than I ever could have imagined. Plus, I've never been to the Boston area before, so that will be nice. I'm still pinching myself with disbelief that they would invite me to this thing. I can't imagine who would have recommended me, but I'm grateful! Part of me still thinks this is a scam, a Who's Who Among American High School Students type of scheme. At any rate, I'll definitely blog my notes from the program and make sure Drupal and the progressive IP/publishing model we're adhering to for Into the Blogosphere get some attention.

I hope lots of demonstrators and D.C. observers blog about the march this weekend. At any rate, I'll be looking forward to reading Rad Geek's thoughts about it when he gets back. Anyone else going and planning on blogging it?

Edited to add: I'll check La Di Da when she gets back too.

Charlie has posted his prospectus, for anyone who's interested. The title is "'The Future Is Open' for Composition Studies: An Alternative Intellectual Property Model for the Digital Age." May it be the inauguration of a movement in scholarly publishing in Rhetoric and Composition.

Holy crap! I was just doing a little research for my dissertation (I'm interested in looking at blogs by mothers) and ended up at the site for the Hip Mama (a magazine, in case you didn't know). I hadn't been to the site in a while, and I'm pleasantly surprised that they are now running on Drupal. It looks like they aren't running version 4.4, though, since my hub username and password didn't work when I tried to login. They hope that the site will have more of a community feel now. 8)

Today, among lots and lots of other things, I must write a 500-word essay for my Rhetorical Theory class on The New Rhetoric by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca. I also have to do some work with the blog collection (for those of you who have been asking when the frell the collection is going live, we're aiming for mid-June). I should also be working on my final papers for my Rhetorical Theory class and my Women's Studies class, gah. For the former, which is intended to be a conference paper, I had been thinking about doing something applying the theory we've covered in class to blogging, but now that I'm all in a tizzy about taking the prelims this summer, I was thinking about doing something more like a prelim-style explication of Habermas and the public sphere. I figure a blog researcher ought to know her Habermas, since it's been linked to blogging by several people. For example, there's Invisible Adjunct's blogroll, and Andrew Ó Baoill has been doing some good work in this vein as well. I also need to be fine-tuning my CCCC proposal.

What I'd rather be doing: Knitting and exercising. I know it might be hard for you to believe, but for the past few weeks, I've been going to the gym nearly every day. I used to exercise all the time when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I'm starting to get that kind of enjoyment out of it again. I do 30 minutes on the elliptical machine, and then I go to the weight room, where I do tricep presses, arm curls, the torso-twist machine that works your obliques, leg curls, leg extensions, and leg presses. Three sets, twelve reps each. It makes me feel great--lightweight and strong, like I'm made of titanium. :)

Soon I'll be doing a little weekend jaunt to Fargo, at which I'll be presenting on the now-defunct Invisible Adjunct. I need to get my paper, which is now around 15 pages, into manageable, presentation-friendly chunks of information. I think I'll use the collaborative book module of Drupal for my presentation this time. Ah. It's Saturday night, and I'm sitting around feeling guilty over being so unproductive. I've been doing laundry and talking to long-distance friends on the phone, and now that it's after midnight, I've decided to go through the very helpful comments that Carol and Art gave me. I hope to be able to get some comments from IA herself too; I sent her the paper a few months ago but haven't sent a gentle reminder for some feedback yet.