ELO Call Up

I know that it has been a long time since we last met, Internet. But today I come to you bearing good news - the ELO has posted their new conference call! My friend Melinda just passed the link along to me.

The conference is going to be held June 3-6 (2010) at Brown University. I very much recommend you submitting a proposal if this sort of thing is up your ally, because the ELO people in general have been quite nice to me in the past and are very friendly to everyone, but especially so to young scholars and non-academics interested in the field. I attended and presented at the 2008 conference and had a great time where I met many elit artists and learned a ton from the other scholars and presentations. If you are new to the field, this is a great place to start learning. If you've already dabbled a bit in the topic, this is a great place to get your inner-geek paparazzi on, because I'll guarantee you that there will be a plethora of names you know milling about at the treat tables between presentations.

The web's area-code should be 404

Issues of permanence come up again and again for even the casual user of web spaces. Today, though, I ran across an illustrative instance in which the problem (and its seriousness) seems aptly demonstrated.

Earlier, while checking in with the ELO and reading some of N. Katherine Hayles' work, I decided to go visit her webpage that accompanies her most recent publication, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. I clicked through to the site that is linked from the ELO homepage, and double-checked the site address with the one published in the hard-copy text.

Sadly, this is what I got:
The "Site Temporarily Unavailable" page.

This is, probably, just a fluke. I visited Hayles' page a couple of weeks ago without any problems. But the fact that the ubiquitous "try again" page shows up even among the work of the most diligent digital scholars is disconcerting to say the least. There are problems with digital scholarship, as we all know. I think that sometimes it is easy to get into a hopeful mindset about these problems, thinking that they will "be fixed" soon enough. But I don't know that that is the case with this particular problem of location and fixability. There are tons of people out there writing on the issue now, so I'll leave it up to you to go seek them out. I certainly don't have a solution.

New Media and Narrative

Looking back over the posts I've made in the last couple of months, I realized that I never linked to the my New Media and Narrative website I'm submitting as part of an ongoing process to legitimate myself as a Ph.D. scholar.

I created the site as a resource for people who are looking to begin investigation into the field of narratology (with a leaning towards new media)- here they can learn a wee bit about a smorgasbord of narrative concepts and see them in action as they apply to digital and electronic narratives. The print work I investigate here, "Roman Fever" is a classic short story by Edith Wharton (but don't read my analysis until you've read to the end of her text). The second short story I look into, "My Body: A Wunderkammer" is also a great piece to read if you are looking for a way to fill about an hour of free time or if you are interested in the role of bodies in narratives, and comes from the enormously talented Shelley Jackson. While the third piece, Afternoon, isn't a freely-accesbile work, I also highly recommend people who are interesting in postmodern or non-linear narratives to consider ponying up the $25 for the Eastgate work - it is a foundational piece in electronic literature and can open up some interesting theoretical doors for scholars. Plus, about 99% of people writing in the field will make more than a passing reference to Joyce's work, so it can be helpful to have some first-hand knowledge of it.

Planting a Tree

I found this link to the short history of Twitter (so far) today while browsing through a bunch of saved links I'd been meaning to get to. It is a visually beautiful piece and it gets brownie points for making a reference to Britney Spears' lady-parts. Err... that's twitter for you.

Google Maps + Monopoly

For those of you looking to play the world's biggest game of Monopoly, wait no longer. Google Maps and Monopoly have teamed up to offer you the geekiest version of one of the longest childhood games ever. I've never been a huge Monopolizer before, because the game takes way too long and involves too much strategy, but just in case your employer is forcing you to take an unpaid day off, here is one more way to fill the empty void.

Internships and the Law

A couple of weeks ago, a professor kept urging me to go find myself an unpaid internship so that I could get more real-world experience. Despite the fact that my work schedule and my finances allow me to do very few things that include extra work and no pay, I got to thinking about the possibility. Today I was pointed to this article, which talks about the very common, but apparently illegal practice of offering unpaid internships. Who knew?

"In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple: no
work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company. That
is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s
calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and
report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists
the employer in any way in running their business."

True, the article is from 2007, but I don't know that much has changed in this regard since then. I also wonder what the rules are regarding "volunteers" - and who decides the differences between the two types of work?

And they said the internets weren't addictive...

Today I stumbled upon Google's wonder wheel feature. I like it. Because the internet isn't already cracked out enough for me, now I can see the links between my searches and the rest of the universe.

This is a screenshot from a search I initially did for a desktop scanner. To get to the wonder wheel page, I looked under the options tag beside my original google search. Not only can you watch your search moving along towards some unforeseen end, there are cool dynamic graphics that catch your eye as the screen changes. Figures that google would find another shiny thing to get my attention.