Experts at the Smithsonian are using 3D scans of artifacts, like this 19th-century explorer’s skull, to recreate the past. Robert Kennicott, a naturalist and early contributor to the Smithsonian collections, died mysteriously on an expedition in 1866. When forensic anthropologists from the National Museum of Natural History exhumed him in 2001 to determine his cause of death, however, they discovered evidence that pointed to natural causes. They were also left with a good looking human skull on their hands — an ideal item for Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo (aka the “laser cowboys” of the Smithsonian’s 3D digitization team) to scan. With a digital scan and replica of the skull, a sculptor recreated Kennicott’s face.

Sven Birkerts. EVERY SO OFTEN SOMETHING will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I'm sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never has. But it is an attribute of the Internet to activate in me, and maybe in all its users, a persistent sense of deferred expectancy, as if that thing that I might be looking for, that I couldn't name but would know if I saw, were at every moment a finger tap away. That is the root of the addiction right there — and it is an addiction, sure, if only a lower-case one. To bear all this, therefore, to proof myself against the unstanchable flow of unnecessary information and peripheral sensation, I make use of this shield, which is really just an attention-averting reflex, a way of filtering almost everything away, leaving just the barest bones of whatever I happen to be looking at, and these only in case some tell-tale name or expression requires me to peer a bit more closely. 

How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon

This essay surveys the development and current state of electronic literature, from the popularity of hypertext fiction in the 1980’s to the present, focusing primarily on hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, “codework,” generative art and the Flash poem. It also discusses the central critical issues raised by electronic literature, pointing out that there is significant overlap with the print tradition. At the same time, the essay argues that the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works. A final section discusses the Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination (PAD) initiative of the Electronic Literature Organization, including the Electronic Literature Collection Volume I and the two white papers that are companion pieces to this essay, “Acid Free Bits” and “Born Again Bits.” Intended audiences include scholars, administrators, librarians, and funding administrators, respectively, who are new to electronic literature and for whom it is hoped this essay will serve as a useful introduction. Because this essay is the first systematic attempt to survey and summarize the fast-changing field of electronic literature, artists, designers, writers, critics, and other stakeholders may find it useful as an overview, with emphasis on recent creative and critical works.

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published several posts about WordPress and Omeka, two great content management systems designed to make it easy for you to publish and organize your online content. How you let readers know when you publish new content, however, is up to you. One strategy is to use social networks like Twitter to send out short blurbs about new posts. However, managing an online profile and manually sending out these updates can be time consuming. While some Twitter plugins already exist for WordPress to Tweet automatically a link to a new post, I haven’t found one that worked especially well. And as far as I could tell, there was no such plugin for Omeka. Until mow.

Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation that we desire - and that we deserve.

Born in Japan but now living and working in New York City, artist Kumi Yamashita does incredible things with light and shadows. Kumi has an impressive list of solo and group shows sine the late 90s along with a host of permanent collections around the world. Kumi received her bachelor in fine arts at the Cornish College of the Arts in Washington and obtained her masters in fine art from the Glasgow School of Art in the UK. In her series entitled Light & Shadow, Kumi uses a single light source along with an assortment of perfectly placed objects to create incredible shadow silhouettes and artwork on walls. Please enjoy this small sample below, and be sure to visit Kumi’s official site for even more amazing artwork.

That’s the promise and the terror of this new form. We can interact with its entertainments. We can summon new layers of noise and color. The American video game is enabling us to live out deeper escapist fantasies than TV ever has. Right now we’re mainly using this new medium to imagine that we are space aliens and NFL quarterbacks and mercenaries with hearts of steel. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In 1916, six years after Mark Twain’s death, his biographer and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine released a book titled THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER, claiming it was Mark Twain’s last major work. The book has now passed into public domain and remains widely available. In 1963 scholars, led by researcher John S. Tuckey, carefully examined Twain’s papers and manuscripts and discovered that Paine had tampered with and patched together three previously unfinished manuscripts and with assistance from Frederick Duneka added passages not written by Mark Twain in order to complete the THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER. Paine’s volume was a literary fraud that went undetected for more than forty years.

Cathy Davidson. I cannot imagine a more important time to graduate from a School of Information and Library Science than now. If we think of our world-changing Information Age as beginning in April 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser was made available to the general public, here you are, certified experts in the science of our Information Age. You have the tools, experience, and knowledge to understand this mystifying, electrifying historical moment that the rest of us are grappling with. What doesn’t count as “information science” in 2012?

My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.

Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.

Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media. Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

THE HUNGER GAMES’ reign at the box office is over, at least until sequel Catching Fire drops on its ironclad release date of Thanksgiving 2013, but the behind-the-scenes games are in full swing. Studio Lionsgate is moving into casting, having replaced director Gary Ross with Francis Lawrence; Ross also won’t have input on the script as he did with the first film, as it’s being handled by Slumdog Millionaire writer Simon Beaufoy. Many in Hunger Games fandom griped about these decisions, but there’s an upside: Catching Fire could be better than The Hunger Games.

I think Carr’s premises are correct: the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought. The web presents us with unprecedented abundance. This can lead to interrupt-driven info-snacking, which robs people of the ability to find time to think about just one thing persistently. I also think that these changes are significant enough to motivate us to do something about it. I disagree, however, about what it is we should actually be doing.

The computer, the latest development in writing technology, promises, or threatens, to change literacy practices for better or worse, depending on your point of view. For many of us, the computer revolution came long ago, and it has left its mark on the way we do things with words. We take word processing as a given. We don’t have typewriters in our offices anymore, or pencil sharpeners, or even printers with resolutions less than 300 dpi. We scour MacUser and PC World for the next software upgrade, cheaper RAM, faster chips, and the latest in connectivity. We can’t wait for the next paradigm shift.

Student Class Website, sample

This assignment sequence introduces students to effective research methods through a series of engaging, interactive, and collaborative tasks that lead to the development of a multi-modal research dossier and a media project.

Quick: What’s the fattiest system in your body that has two halves and weighs between 2 and 4 pounds? It’s your brain — you know, that thing that remembers stuff. But because of rapidly evolving information technology, your first impulse was probably to search for the answer on the Internet. As we become ever more dependent on external sources of memory — using GPS to guide our driving, smartphones to keep our schedules — it’s time to rethink our ideas about what “memory” actually is.

“I SING the body electric,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1855, inspired by the novelty of useful electricity, which he would live to see power streetlights and telephones, locomotives and dynamos. In “Leaves of Grass,” his ecstatic epic poem of American life, he depicted himself as a live wire, a relay station for all the voices of the earth, natural or invented, human or mineral. “I have instant conductors all over me,” he wrote. “They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me… My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself.”

WHEN a friend recently asked for advice about using social media, I excitedly embarked on a description of my daily routine — checking in on Foursquare to share my whereabouts with friends, posting tweets to Twitter, sharing screenshots from the latest “Mad Men” episode on Tumblr, and skimming through the stylized images on Instagram.

On this day 121 years ago, Mark Twain wrote Walt Whitman an effusive letter wishing him a happy 70th birthday: What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, and the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal tar, those latest and strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these, for you have seen the application of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have sen the slave set free, you have seen monarchy banished from France, and reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence and attention to business, but isn’t connected with the works.

Given how paradigmatic airplanes have become, though, it’s easy to forget how similarly paradigmatic airships once were. If technology is a kind of Darwinian race, dirigibles and their counterparts spent a long time, actually, winning. In the 1930s, as the Empire State Building grew beam by beam and slab by slab, people awaited — and expected — a future that would find them voyaging and dining and sleeping and dancing in the sky.

2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. The shift was heralded in tech circles with prophetic fury: “The phone call is dead,” pronounced a blogger at the Web site TechCrunch. Writing in Wired, journalist Clive Thompson observed, “This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social network messaging.” And the online news network True/Slant declared a paradox: “We’re well on our way to becoming an incredibly disconnected connected society

Andrew Piper. The recent publication of Nabokov’s final, uncompleted novel, The Original of Laura (Knopf 2008), as a book of facsimile note cards was a timely reminder of the tangled history of the relationship between the book and the note. In its loving reproduction of the authors’ note cards in codex form, The Original of Laura performed, at a profoundly visual and tactile level, a morphological theory of media – that notes could become books, indeed that these two very different forms of writing could in fact be synonymous with one another. But in the cards’ perforation – one of the most inspired publishing decisions of this our late age of print – the note cards’ possible removal from the book also drew attention to the hole in the book…that was the note. Without notes, so Laura tells us, we have no books.

When were bent-wire paper clips introduced? The first bent-wire paper clip was patented by Samuel B. Fay in 1867. This clip was originally intended primarily for attaching tickets to fabric, although the patent recognized that it could be used to attach papers together. We have found no advertisement or other mention for the Fay paper clip before 1899, and it therefore appears unlikely that it had significant, if any, sales prior to the late 1890s. However, beginning in 1899 and for decades thereafter, the Fay design was widely advertised under many brand names for use in fastening papers.

ONE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? is as a book about literary history, about a period, now over, in which writing by black people was oriented toward a response to the conditions of Jim Crow. In an exchange between Warren and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Warren himself suggests this approach when he says that he could have called it What Was Negro Literature? To which Gates replies “The end of Negro Literature? I like that.” But for precisely the reason that Gates wishes he had, Warren didn’t call it What Was Negro Literature? Negro literature — the negro himself — is comfortably a thing of the past: Gates and Warren are professors of African American not Negro Studies; there are hundreds of universities and colleges that grant degrees in Black or African American studies, but not one that grants a degree in Negro studies. Warren’s point in insisting on “African American” is to insist that, even while eagerly putting the Negro behind it, African American literature has just as eagerly hung on to the legacy of Jim Crow, has mistakenly continued to understand racial disparity as the lynchpin of American inequality and thus, to put all his cards on the table, has become a force that works against rather than for the equality it imagines itsef to seek. (And to put all mine on the table, Warren, Adolph Reed and I are working together on a book, You Can’t Get There From Here, about neoliberalism and the current politics of race.)

Last week, I explained that wikis are, despite their unusual name, friendly and easy-to-use. This week: Some pedagogical reasons for giving the software a try. I think that there are a couple of different ways of thinking about this: designing a wiki-style course, and using a wiki to power a particular assignment. A lot of wiki evangelism tends to focus on their transformative power, which can be both exhilarating and a bit scary. I think it’s possible, though, to adopt wikis incrementally, and in the process can do some genuinely new things.

E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it.

Class notes are epistemologically weird. On the one hand, they feel quite private, but, on the other, if your understanding of what went on in class is too idiosyncratic, then you're likely to do poorly on exams or essays. Also, to whatever extent a class is a shared intellectual enterprise, there should be at least *some* common understanding of what has gone on during our time together. It can be hard to improve one's notetaking skills, because it's traditionally such an individual practice. Enter the wiki.
 

I’ve always used group blogs in my classes: one central, collaborative blog where every students posts. I prefer this format over the hub model, in which an official class site links out to individual student blogs spread across the students’ own preferred blogging platforms. If nothing else, the group blog makes my job easier. I can read all the posts in one place. It also makes it more likely that students will read each other’s posts, generating a sense of momentum that is so important to the students’ buy-in of class blogging.

This is especially disconcerting when it comes to information being shared with youth. Kids and teens are bombarded with messages from a myriad of sources that using new technology is high-risk behavior. Downloading music is compared to stealing a bicycle — even though many downloads are lawful. Making videos using short clips from other sources is treated as probably illegal — even though many such videos are also lawful.
This misinformation is harmful, because it discourages kids and teens from following their natural inclination to be innovative and inquisitive. The innovators, artists and voters of tomorrow need to know that copyright law restricts many activities but also permits many others. And they need to know the positive steps they can take to protect themselves in the digital sphere. In short, youth don't need more intimidation — what they need is solid, accurate information.

The abstract I submitted last fall declared that I’d draw upon Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 to show that scholars hold the means of production of editions more immediately now than in any prior decade since the 1470s. I’m trained as a medievalist and a manuscript scholar, and this is not hyperbole. I’ll touch upon some reasons why one may want to create a scholarly digital edition, then walk through some necessarily abstract components of creating one, with the goal of demystifying a starting workflow. To the extent that my talk has a thesis, it is this: you, too, can make a digital edition if you have even the slightest interest in doing so. This talk thus “draws upon” my Autobiography experience and related work to enable you to do something entirely different from the Autobiography, for reasons that’ll be clear a bit later.

Once upon a time I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down “only” a thousand words. Once upon a time I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than a fortnight between them. Once upon a time I was, more or less, content. “Once upon a time” refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006), during which I wrote several books and published more than 50 pieces of magazine journalism and criticism – a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realise this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness. Obviously I was disciplined. These days I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction – excepting those I was also reviewing – in the last year. These days I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon and spend my evenings playing video games. These days I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-earth trajectories.

If you are wondering what the term Cultural Technique(s), or in its native language, Kulturtechniken, refers to - this is the quote you need. In most articles on the topic, Thomas Macho’s words are recounted, and used so why not recirculate them once more: “Cultural techniques—such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music—are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and still today, people sing or make music without knowing anything about tones or musical notation systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. To be sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematical operations, but they did not necessarily derive from this a concept of number.”

For the most part this means that the original boxes and folders are replaced with new, acid-free ones, but I can remember at least one case in which strips of nitrate film (combustible) needed to be removed, and another in which a sample of mineral hornblende or pitchblende (radioactive) had to be whisked away. These things happen. By far the most common hazard excised from within boxes and folders, though, is the paperclip. Like water, mold, insects, and war, paperclips are the enemies of archival preservation. Like water, mold, and insects, paperclips have no history. (Wars, as we know, have histories according in part to the archives that survive them.) A potential agent of rust, the paperclip is forever banished from the historical record wherever professional archivists hold sway. A paperclip is neither document nor document-able but slips unwanted into a barely discernable crack between the archive and museum. There is a bricks-and-mortar museum someplace in Britain devoted to the history of the pencil and one in Baltimore devoted to the history of the tampon, or so I’ve been told, but no museum that I know of renders a history of the paperclip. There is no such thing

As Douglas Adams once memorably said, ‘lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food’. The message is the thing, not the medium through which it is conveyed. But if this is true of print, will it not turn out to be equally true of ‘Digital’? There appears to be some confusion about which ‘Age’ it is that we are living through. Some call it the ‘Digital Age’, and characterise the revolution as being one driven by technology. Others would have it as the ‘Information Age’, regarding the technology merely as a tool through which the rich information layer of daily life is exposed, manipulated and enhanced.

Most famously, he coined the term “pseudo-event” as a way to describe the public relations driven, over-dramatized media moment. He saw events and ideas enjoying dissemination and attention based on little more than their appropriateness to a sensationalist media. These synthetic events distracted us from the issues that mattered, and recast everything in the language of image. He feared presidential debates becoming too much like quiz shows, and coverage drifting from issues that matter to discussions of the candidates’ television performances. The pseudo-event highlights only pseudo-qualifications.

Galleycat notes that a team at USC has nabbed a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to, as the grant states, “support production costs for a video game based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

For now consider this: Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owners.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College, teaches media production, history and theory. BShe has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and has taught courses at NYU, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Claremont Graduate University, and Pitzer College, on YouTube, media archives, activist media, documentary, and feminist film. Dr. Juhasz has written multiple articles on feminist, fake, and AIDS documentary. Her current work is on and about YouTube, and other more radical uses of digital media.

At least in part, we rely on a set of cues — titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given — that have long been bound up in the concept of “expertise”. If a person is deemed an expert, we are more credulous of their claims, and their words carry more weight. But expertise is a fraught commodity — lashed inextricably to the commodities of privilege and power. Does an expert on poverty know more than someone who is poor? Are women given expert status on issues relating to women, but not others? Does expertise itself invest people with perverse incentives to maintain the status quo? How we ascribe expertise shapes whose voices and ideas have purchase in our discourse — whose books get published, whose writing fill op-ed column inches, who sits at what tables.

I’ve been involved with digital humanities centers for close to twenty years, and have now held most of the positions that one can hold (short of actually directing one). I’ve been a graduate student staff member, a full-time software engineer, an outside consultant, and a Fellow. I’ve watched centers rise and fall, flourish and fade, but centers have always played a, well, central role in my scholarly life.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that digital centers should become little ivory towers in the wider fortress. But I would suggest that Deans and Administrators preparing to establish Centers ask themselves why the Center for Peace Studies is not expected to ensure peaceful meetings in the German Department or why the Bioinformatics Initiative is not saddled with the task of assisting anyone who expresses an interest in their family history. Are we finally ready to create centers in the Digital Humanities that are valued not because of the services they provide, but because of the culture they represent – a culture that has always been about the two things we value most: the advancement of knowledge and the education of students.

1. The phrase “reading revolution” was probably coined by German historian Rolf Engelsing. He certainly made it popular. Engelsing was trying to describe something he saw in the 18th century: a shift from “intensive” reading and re-reading of very few texts to “extensive” reading of many, often only once. Think of reading the Bible vs reading the newspaper. Engelsing called this shift a “Lesenrevolution,” lesen being the German equivalent of reading. He thought he had found when modern reading emerged, as we’d recognize it today, and that it was this shift that effectively made us modern readers.

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done. Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There, I stopped it; at dawn the northernmost edges lay over the Plaza; the free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle. But experiencing a faint irritation at stopping, even to protect the trees, and seeing no reason the balloon should be allowed to expand upward, over the parts of the city it was already covering, into the “air space” to be found there, I asked the engineers to see to it. This expansion took place throughout the morning, soft imperceptible sighing of gas through the valves. The balloon then covered forty-five blocks north-south and an irregular area east-west, as many as six crosstown blocks on either side of the Avenue in some places. This was the situation, then.

Turn on the light so I can see this record label, please—The inventions of Thomas Edison, which became the hallmarks of 20th century civilization, are dead, dying, substantially altered, or doomed. The new century will be something else: the Post Edison Age. It is hard to imagine one man who had more influence.

One of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or a bundle of twigs. In the process, it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight.

Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film’s most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

Graphic novels have been gaining acceptance in classrooms and school libraries across the nation — and for good reason. They can often motivate even the most reluctant readers to turn page after page, becoming wrapped up in the images and text they contain, and this makes graphic novels amazing teaching tools on a wide variety of subjects. If you’re looking to make the most of this media for engaging your students and exploring the great stories they have to tell, here are some great ways to enrich your classes with graphic novels that any teacher can employ in the service of a every age group possible

About once a month, I get asked by a colleague or friend for the syllabus I used to teach my seminar on the Graphic Novel at Amherst. Included below is a list of the texts that I used to teach students. In that seminar I allowed optional creative exercises and finals, and that led to me teaching tutorials in the making of comics, which led to me advising two graphic novel theses to summa honors. I’m very proud of those students, who were both also awarded the English Department’s prize for best thesis. Amherst’s English department was very generous and supportive in the teaching I did there throughout, and I’m incredibly grateful for the hard work of all of my students.

Class notes are epistemologically weird. On the one hand, they feel quite private, but, on the other, if your understanding of what went on in class is too idiosyncratic, then you’re likely to do poorly on exams. (Also, to whatever extent a class is a shared intellectual enterprise, there should be at least *some* common understanding of what has gone on during our time together.) It can be hard to improve one’s notetaking skills, because it’s traditionally such an individual practice. Enter the wiki.

Most introductions to XML seek to explain when one should use XML instead of HTML, an approach that is most easily understood by those who already have some experience with HTML authoring. Other resources intended to introduce XML to novices, like the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Gentle introduction to XML, go beyond merely describing why humanities scholars might wish to use XML and what an XML document looks like, aiming also both to situate XML in a general context of markup languages and to introduce the syntax of the formal schema languages used to model them. Digital humanities scholars will need this information eventually, and perhaps even fairly early in their training, but including it in the very first introduction that complete novices will read entails the risk of inadvertently confusing or intimidating the new learner.

At last, an explanation for humanists that is actually a gentle introduction. Suggestions for improving this tutorial are greatly appreciated.

When you search the web, you pretty much just search “the full text” of what’s out there. That means you can find individual words or phrases anywhere they occur in a webpage. Certain databases and subscription-only electronic resources also let you search or browse metadata fields like title, author, and date of publication, but even in these cases the body of the document is still one big mass.