Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

ok, jeesh...how do i do this. i've got divergent interests. the first is props for the society of american archivists' annual meeting. it's going on now... link here . as derrida says (and this is HUGE): ...the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of "repression" and "suppression," even if it cannot necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight that imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise. always already politics in naming and organizing. here's where it gets weird, different, ...

Well, classes have started and young scholars are scurrying about. Part of their scurrying involves trips to the bookstore to drop cash (or plastic) on textbooks. Like everyone else, I've heard students complaining about the cost and weight of many of their texts; fortunately, they haven't complained outright with regard to my singular required text (all other readings are available free-o-charge digitally). These laments are part of the reason that I think it's pretty cool that Amazon intends to market a version of its Kindle to colleges and universities. I read about this on TechCrunch...the link is here . I am sure that opposition to this will take many forms ranging from fear of Amazon's hegemony (because traditional purveyors of textbooks aren't hegemomic in their own right) to "oh my gosh Student Stores has gone/will go out of business!" to complaints that nothing beats the feel and experience of a "real" book. To all of these detractors, I...

I get the Seattle Times news feed in my reader...it's a good "paper" and it makes me feel connected to the Emerald City. Several days ago Brier Dudley crafted a piece entitled "Newspapers as Social Networks" where his central thesis seemed to revolve around an adamant claim that newspapers (and "traditional" news sources like NPR) still matter and that they can be construed as social networks. This seems right-headed and I buy in, but I can see how folks might now assume the term social network to mean what used to be referred to as online social network ( OSN ). This is, of course, fair play since language leaks, changes, and morphs in response to shifting contexts and paradigms. Web 2.0 has certainly fostered many shifting contexts and practices...realities do look differently these days. In reading Dudley's piece, namely where to responds to Mark Anderson 's tacit claim that newspapers are dead, I could not help but think of the vide...

It seems like a month of Sundays since I've blogged... syllabi , research, and baby created the perfect storm that pulled me away. But, alas and alack. So, to that end...those last two sentences are what I love about blogs...the context and constructedness of the reading and writing that happens there. The discourse can be hokey (see above), high brow, insightful, or inane. The geographical texture is just amazing and, being a Compositionist , I'm grateful for it because I'm allowed a ton of latitude and unfettered reflexivity that other spaces don't provide. All of this sentimentality plays in to the debate that happened recently when Clay Shirkey "dissed Tolstoy". My pal Mike Brown turned me on to this melee. Check it out at: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#rc The story is about halfway down the page and includes many responses worth a skim through. What I like about the debate is that it's an old one and I'm hoping that Shirkey...

It's the day after BotCamp and I am slowly unpacking the experience. The impressions that seem to last at the fore revolve around the importance of what I'm terming as "the experiential". Basically this is a reference to kinesthetic learning, or learning by doing and interacting with actual objects and artifacts. Please (re)read my previous post and linkage to BotCamp if you need to...it's a quick skim through. What's huge for me as I comb through my ethnographic notes is the impact that BotCamp participants felt from walking through the woods and handling plants, leaves, and trees. All of the technology enhanced curriculum we designed really facilitated access to vast amounts of information (which was the point), but the exhilaration and learning seemed to stem (no pun intended) from actual material relations. Too much of our curriculum seems to fetishize technology, simulation, and "the virtual". Not that technology, simulation, new media, et...