Here’s a little spreadsheet I put together about Twitter use at three conferences: Digital Humanities 2009, THATcamp 2009, and the (just-ended) Modern Language Association convention of 2009: As you can probably see, what I did was to divide the total number of tweets during the date range of the conference by the number of days of the conference to get the average number of tweets per day. There are only 3.62 days of data for MLA because I downloaded the Twitter archive at about 4pm today in..   show all text

This morning, awfully bright and awfully early, I participated in a fantastic roundtable on the legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was quite well-attended, given the early hour and that it was the last day of the conference, and which produced some really fascinating presentations. I’d promised my friends at wallace-l that I’d post my thoughts about the panel to the list afterward, and having done that, I’d like to post them here as well. I thought the panel was excellent, overall; it was w..   show all text

Here's another odd pink phenomenon. This is a page from a Toys 'R Us catalog, illustrating some science toys, and note the odd distinctions being made. Both the telescope and the microscope come in special pink versions, just for the girl who is apparently more interested in getting an instrument that matches her nail polish than being functional, and note also (you may have to click through to see the larger image) that in every case the pink model is less powerful than the black and gray mod..   show all text

This year was to be my fourth year attending MLA in a row. I spoke in 2006, interviewed in 2007, spoke and interviewed in 2008, and had hoped to speak and interview this year as well. When the interviews did not materialize, I made the difficult decision to not attend the convention given the financial realities of being an adjunct faculty member. I regretted not having the chance to speak–especially on a panel titled “Today’s Teachers, Today’s Students: Economics”–but the panel chair voluntee..   show all text

Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks: There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free? Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on boar..   show all text