By Allan Metcalf. A language is a dialect with an army and navy, as the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich once supposedly said. We could update that to say a language is a dialect with an army, navy, and Silicon Valley, and it’s that, not any intrinsic merit, that makes English the dominant language of the world so far this century. More...
By Allan Metcalf. Hack, hack, hack!
What’s that?
It’s the sound of a nation of hackers. That’s us in the 21st century.
Not so long ago, in the previous century, a hack was just a term at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an ingenious solution to a problem. More...
By William Germano. It’s commencement season, and we all faced once again the last-minute fumble to figure out a pronunciation for Latin honorifics.
The responsibility for enunciating such things before a rapt audience of parents and well-wishers may fall on different shoulders depending on the institution, but if you’re an academic, there’s an excellent chance you’ll face the problem at one time or another. More...
By Jason B. Jones. One exciting aspect of digital humanities work is its openness to collaboration, including collaboration with students. As someone who used to coordinate an undergraduate research program, I’ve always been particularly excited about opportunities to involve students in meaningful research–and participating actively in an ongoing research project certainly counts. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. In May, Amy wrote suggested Sunrise as an interesting cross-platform calendar option, right before it was bought by Microsoft. I don’t use Sunrise myself (Fantastical for life), but their most recent version does have a feature that led me to install it: The ability to send invitations via any iOS or Android app that accepts text input. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. What with all the news from Wisconsin and North Carolina and, let’s face it, the whole world of public higher education, it can seem legitimately overwhelming/despairing. One concrete thing to do would be to improve one’s faculty activism skills, and the best place to do that is the AAUP’s Summer Institute. It’s a three-day boot-camp in organizing one’s colleagues, talking to the media, pressuring senior administrators, and much else. Read more...By Prof. Hacker. There is research to perform. Lectures to prepare. Exams to grade. Articles to write and meetings to attend. The life of a professor is like the pulse of an airport: arrivals, departures, a steady stream of events all lining up against a timetable. It’s a hard balance between commitments and managing one’s time. However, when a longterm care situation combines with an already demanding career, the demands for time and attention increase. Read more...By Lee Skallerup Bessette. We try to eat well in our family, but vegetables have always been a challenge. Between two picky eaters when it comes to veggies (my husband and my son), we tend to get stuck in a rut, buying the same veggies prepared in the same ways over and over and over again. We start eating less and less of them per meal, and then, suddenly, we barely eating any at all. Read more...
By Brian Mathews. A few weeks ago I heard Carrie Donovan (Head of Teaching and Learning, Indiana University Libraries ) give a keynote address at The Innovative Library Classroom Conference.
Here are the slides from her talk: Shaking up the Sediment: Re-energizing Pedagogical Practice while Avoiding Bottle Shock. And here are slides from the other presentations at the conference. More...
By Anastasia Salter. Last week I attended the HASTAC Conference, an interdisciplinary conference from the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (one of the oldest and most active academic social networks around). HASTAC is dedicated to public scholarship: many of its initiatives are based around blogging and sharing ideas through the social network, and the conference included livestreaming many sessions for a virtual conference, with a very active Twitter feed supported by designated tweeters at each panel. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
