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

This week is ALA's Banned Books Week and it's pretty exciting on a lot of fronts. Hopefully everyone can locate and attend an event in your area . Maybe because I'm around a lot of young people and academics, and I take such open mindedness and progressivism for granted, but at first thought I was rather blase about this year's celebration of Banned Books. What I mean here is that I was looking forward to it but thought that "Hey, we've all moved past this crazy McCarthy-esque fear of change and critique and difference". I thought that maybe these books could be celebrated on a literary level and, while they're always already political, I could let political and cultural critique reside in the background. But, alas and alack, the blogosphere delivers. One of my favorite bloggers, Jessamyn West, posted an expositio n that touches on Sarah Palin's purported inclination to stricture thought via banning books at her local library. Of course, the...

The following may be of interest to many of you out there. The Fourth Annual iConference 2009 February 8-11, 2009 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill iSociety: Research, Education, Engagement CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The Fourth Annual iSchools Conference brings together scholars and professionals who come from diverse backgrounds and share interests in working at the nexus of people, information, and technology. With invited speakers, paper sessions, a poster session, roundtables, "wildcard" sessions and ample opportunities for conversations and connections, the conference celebrates and engages our multidisciplinary efforts to understand the scholarly, educational and engagement dimensions of the iSchool movement. This Call for Participation solicits contributions that reflect on the core activities of the iSchools community as we move more fully into the iSociety. These would include reflections on: research topics, practices, methods and epistemologies appropriat...

I recently embarked upon the characteristically academic task of doing a citation analysis on a few articles I’m using for a research project. Google Scholar and ISI’s Web of Science were the two search engines/databases that I used. Of course, I’ve got some thoughts here…especially as libraries are concerned. I was particularly struck by the stark differences in results that Google Scholar yielded and the results found when using ISI’s Web of Science. At first glance this may seem like stating the obvious, however this experience with citation analysis crystallized a point that I have been ruminating upon for awhile. Libraries are not disappearing, nor are librarians. They still matter, though they matter differently, and the key features of libraries exist as facilitation to access information and the expertise to curate and consult. Without the radical juxtaposition of this citation analysis it would be easy to believe that Google results are significant enough and that using a libr...

Jim Goldman, of CNBC , has a recent post where he takes former Fake Steve Jobs blogger, Dan Lyons , to task. The piece is here . In short, Lyons claims that Apple has become increasingly hegemonic in its own right, no longer the upstart ( jeesh , I guess I can't use "maverick" now). Lyons even makes the stale way-past played out comparison of Apple as Microsoft. On a side note, such rhetorical maneuvers are so tired and preposterous. It's kind of like when someone is "describing" a band and they say: "Oh, they're alternative/folk-punk/ emo /whatever and they sound like REM/The Deadly Syndrome/Bright Eyes/blah". Or, do you ever get tired of the claims when basketball season rolls around and there's that guy who always says that so-and-so is the next Jordan. Even if band, ballers , companies are similar or analogous to other earlier instances and contexts, is this really the best and most incisive way to describe commonalities? Maybe, ...

Last week my vintage 20GB iPod bricked...died, dead, for good. As much of a techno-enthusiast as I am, lusting after the newest in small tech, I continued to use this older version of the iPod even though I have a newer model. Maybe it was because it was the first iPod I owned, or that it worked fine for what I needed, or maybe I was just proving that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Regardless, my 20 GB is done. Maybe fortuitously Apple announced that it will be unveiling upgraded iPods next week (9/9/08 to be exact). I have been seriously considering becoming current, or au courant , even. But I digress, since my iPod bricked I have been riding around listening to CDs (instead of uploading my library to the newer iPod). This experience has proven to be a really weird meditation of sorts. I have become accustomed to certain characteristics of portability and management when it comes to music. This is stating the obvious to most (and prior to a...