On MOOCs and Openness
In his keynote at the recent Educase conference, Internet zealot Clay Shirky made the case that MOOCs are not provocative because they are massive, but because they are open—except they are not really that open. So, I’m no big fan of Shirky’s fanatical obsession with Internet openness, but he’s right in this case. Still, it’s worth pointing out that there’s… read more
On MLA Job Leaks
Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on MLA Job Leaks, an unauthorized, “rogue” website that is republishing the Modern Language Association (MLA) Job Information List (JIL). Currently university departments have to pay to list jobs, and job seekers have to be members of the MLA or the related Association of Departments of English (ADE) or the Association of Departments… read more
It's not the same as writing books
Back when his book The Textual Life of Airports was published in December, Christopher Schaberg reported what most authors do: seeing his book for the first time. “What a weird feeling,” Chris wrote. “It resembles an object from outer space. Vaguely recognizable, yet totally alien at the same time.” This is the experience of most authors. We say we “write… read more
A response to Stanley Fish, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and others
For the first time in five years, I attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. This is the main conference for scholars of language and literature, with about 8,000 attendees at this year’s event in Seattle. Among the big things going down this year: the ongoing clash of cultures between the “traditional humanities”—the scholars who read books and write books… read more
Two new and relatively extensive interviews with me were recently published. The first is in Forbes, conducted by David M. Ewalt. It mostly covers material from my latest book, How to Do Things with Videogames, but there’s some new material toward the end. The second interview, with Aaron McCollough, appears in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. It primarily addresses my… read more
An exhibition of new games for the Atari
I’m curating an exhibit of new Atari games at Babycastles, which opens this Sunday, November 13th. It’s called Innovative Leisure (a term I lifted from an early Atari slogan) and will take place at a new art games arcade at Death By Audio. The show exhibits games by Sonny Ray Tempest, Ed Fries, and Simon Quernhost. The event starts at… read more
A tiny rant
The following message appears on Amazon.com listings for which a Kindle edition appears not to be available. Some of the time, this means that a Kindle edition is not available. But most of the time it is a lie. Why? Because the process of publishing a Kindle edition involves submitting it to Amazon.com, which does the conversion and release process… read more
Kazemi Parses Harman's Objects
If you liked my Latour Litanizer, a tool for creating lists of objects, then you’ll also like Darius Kazemi’s new little gizmo, Objects that are enumerated in Graham Harman’s “Prince of Networks”. Here’s what he did: I wrote a script to parse the original text [Prince of Networks] for things that are probably lists of objects, and then did a… read more
Or, How to Stake Vampire Publishing
Alex Reid wrote an excellent rejoinder against academic book publishing last week. The post was inspired by a discussion at the recent Computers and Writing conference about traditional publishing versus blogging and other forms of digital publishing. It’s an old, perhaps even a boring topic at this point, so Alex turns the subject back on itself: most scholarly monograph book… read more
Newsgames and the Paralysis of Media
I’m at the University of Minnesota this weekend, where Nora Paul has organized a workshop on Newsgames. It’s an excellent group, comprised of equal parts journalists, game developers, and academics. On the flight over, I read Ivor Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia. It’s about the precarious nature of work in the contemporary world, but I happened across a fantastically wry and apt… read more