Typology of New Yorker cartoons

Given the diversity of talents who over the years contributed cartoons to The New Yorker, it may be surprising to learn that everything in our large cartoon bank has, for the sake of easy reference, been reduced to a dozen or so categories…The categories were as follows: arts and galleries; bars and drinking; birds, fish, and animals; businessmen; cars and road signs; cavemen; children, babies, clergymen; cocktail parties; criminals, cops, jails, and judges; doctors and hospitals; heaven, hell, gods, devils, and so forth; olden times (royalty); old people; politicians and generals; musicians; restaurant and food; tourists, vacations; and finally TV and movies. As far as I know, we’ve never had anything in the bank that couldn’t be easily fit into one of those categories. I’m sure the current bank contains a disproportionate number of TV and movie gags. whereas the cocktail party category is rather thinner than it used to be. Desert island and caveman jokes, of course, go on forever.

Lee Lorenz, The Art of The New Yorker 1925-1995, Knopf, 1995

Two projects, two fuzzy ideas, two lit review processes

The 696 independent study is starting out as a literature review of risk in institutional repositories — where it’s perceived to lie, and, what’s interesting to me, who makes the actual decisions? The OAIS model defines the functions of an archival process but leaves the specifics of implementation to each institution. So, for various managerial functions within an archive (archival storage and data management, for example), those functions could be carried out by one person or teams of people. It depends on resources and staffing.
Carolyn has advised me to contextualize the risks within the OAIS model and within institutional repositories, which provides me with a good basis from which to select my sources and also (we hope) prevent me from flying off in all sorts of different directions (such as defining risk, decision making algorithms, how risk is managed in other contexts, and so on). I’ve collected a mass of documents and web pages that I now need to sort through, skim/read, and decide what the current picture of the situation is like. She reminded me at today’s meeting that the goal is not to solve a problem, just to describe the situation.

She liked my abstract and suggested headings/subheadings, so she’s assured that I seem to be moving in the right direction. The precise path I’m still working out, but the direction is fine.

For the 780 Research Methods course, we received very good comments and annotations on our Problem Statements, which were intended to help us think through the research problem we’re proposing, start looking for some literature to support it, and define the research questions that will drive our projects. The key here is to ask the right questions and make sure they’re right-sized, so to speak.

As I was writing my statement, I could feel the question and underlying assumptions change under my fingers. That’s OK, that’s part of the process. (And the value of deadlines, it must be said, is that they focus one’s mind powerfully. Damn them.) The professor started out liking my topic and then seemed to veer toward, well, maybe what you’re really asking is this. And I have to agree with her.

So, I need to work on that section some more.

Upcoming is a literature review that has to include at least 8 pieces, at least 4 of which need to be empirical studies. Based on my 696 and problem statement experiences, I can tell that I’ll need to review/download about 25-40 items to find references that inform what I want to do. The trick here is being sure in my mind what it is I want to do.

I spent this afternoon at the library and found 4 books on community networks that I hope will have either good info I can use or leads on studies. Generally, once you’ve found a good article or lit review on the topic, that’s the mother lode that can lead to more and better items.

Must keep in mind, though, that the finished piece is due in about 10 days, which isn’t much time, given the day job, doing our taxes, getting my car worked on, and other obligations. I’ve reluctantly realized that I’ll never get a whole day to just sit and do this work, so I will have to find a way to fit what I have to do into the interstices of my day. Next weekend, though, will need to be devoted to the writing up of whatever I’ve found so I can discover whether what I’ve got will support my research ideas.

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The day I got no research done

  1. I unpack my stuff in the SILS liberry [1] and start researching.
  2. The Maternalistical Cassidy wheels in with Anastasia and asks if I have lunch plans.
  3. I pack up my stuff and we go to lunch (very pleasant).
  4. I unpack my stuff in the SILS liberry and start researching.
  5. People people people walk by and want to chat. Very pleasant but no work is done. [2]
  6. I get an email from Dr. T saying I’ve been accepted into SILS’ doctoral program (!) and I was granted a DigCCurr II Fellowship (!!).
  7. I sit there stunned and forward her mail to various folks, like Liz and Cassidy. I also send her a thank-you mail.
  8. Not really knowing what else to do, and wanting to settle myself down, I go back to my research. About a minute later, Cassidy comes down and hugs my neck and is giddier and more excited about the news than I am. We chat a bit and process the news.
  9. She leaves to go back to her work and I return to my research. It’s a little after 3pm.
  10. Dr. T finds me in the liberry and wants me to walk with her over to Daily Grind so she can get a coffee-booster before her 3:30pm talk.
  11. I pack up my stuff and we walk and talk about the offer.
  12. I finally give up and go home after getting about 20 minutes of research work done. This will be a hard semester.

[1] Many and many a year ago I worked in one of the tech-writing gulags of Northern Telecom. A young Southern lady who managed the Interleaf publishing resources often told us about the templates and files stored in the “liberry.” Sorry, but that pronunciation just stuck in my head and I don’t want it to leave.

[2] Lori says I should get used to this.

There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life” on the road and in the monastery, Mr. Cohen said. “There’s just a sense of purpose” in which “a lot of extraneous material is naturally and necessarily discarded,” and what is left is a “rigorous and severe” routine in which “the capacity to focus becomes much easier.

Leonard Cohen Returns to the Road, for Reasons Both Practical and Spiritual – NYTimes.com
Source: The New York Times

Lavers on The Simple Life

My previous post Fred Stutzman and Facebook reminded me of an essay from the May/August 2000 issue of North American Review.
The essay I tore out and kept in my “Essays” folder lo these many years was by the writer Norman Lavers, now retired from teaching English and enthusiastically maintaining a site on The Robber Flies of Crowley’s Ridge, Arkansas. If you want to know all there is to know about these vicious critters, that’s the site for you.

The essay he wrote, titled “On the Simple Life,” is a fine personal essay that sweeps over the course of his life, the choices he made, and the choices he continues to make. It’s a cranky, curmudgeonly view of the modern world. He preaches about retiring early in your life and then going to work, being frugal with your time, money, and attention (“kill your TV” advice), and generally simplifying your life by letting go of the things that aren’t needed in favor of the essentials that honor you.

The reason I kept the essay, I think, was that he put into words something I’d not seen up to that point. I’ve seen it since (Stutzman mentions it in my previous post) but I’ve come back to it so much in my mind that I thought I’d put the passages here.

He compares the bombardment of TV images to the Web’s bombardment of opinion, flash, etc. You can guess his opinion.

Get off the internet. Oh, how can I? It’s got everything on it. Exactly, and you’re letting it all into your house and into your mind. Be more selective…[O]n the net, I have my privacy. You don’t, you’ve let the whole world in. You’ve let everybody in, and yet no one’s there. Virtual people have invaded your privacy. They’re god-awful boring, but you’re too mesmerized to respond by turning them off…

An essential part of getting off the web is: Don’t do e-mail. But it’s so convenient, so cheap, you will tell me. That’s the problem. ..I inveighed against e-mail in one of my classes and a girl said, “Oh, but this is how I’ve been able to keep in touch with all my friends from high school. Without e-mail I couldn’t have done it.” I was too polite, of course, to say, You should be leaving those kids behind and getting on with your life. If you wouldn’t have kept in touch without e-mail, it means you probably shouldn’t be keeping in touch now. They are getting in the way of your maturing.

If someone distant wants to get in touch with me, he’s going to have to sit down and write me a letter. It takes time, it costs the price of a stamp. He’s going to have to say something that will still be valid several days later when I receive his letter. If I’m not worth it to him, then his emailed Have a nice day! is not worth my receiving…If I had e-mail, I would have a sort of obligation to checked to see what I had each day, and 99% of it (to judge by what my friends say) would be trash, another invasion of privacy. With letters, they come in the box, you can open them when you’re ready, read them a few times, answer at your leisure, It’s a more humane rhythm. Letters can approach to literature. Can you imagine wanting to read Keats’s collected e-mail notes? E-mail is like television: you do it because it is free and easy–but in return it takes away your time, and for one good thing you get from it, you get 99 things of dross. If you are actively doing literary or scientific research, where real information is being exchanged, or if it’s part of your job, okay, yes. For communication with people, no.

Lavers’ preferred mode of engagement is to grow one’s own creative projects, having to do with art or with nature, activities that take you out of yourself and place you in a state of meditation. Hence his enthusiasm with the Robber Flies.

Yes, it’s over the top, but I like his firm this-is-how-it-is tone, which is what makes reading essays fun. Certainly, junk mail is an invasion of privacy, and one is not ever obligated to return an email immediately after it’s been received.

But I was struck by Lavers’ point about e-mail keeping alive relationships that should probably die a natural death and Fred’s point about middle-aged Facebook users reconnecting with people from their high school and college days 20 or more years before. There is the warm flush of remembering what we used to be like, and there’s a pleasing nostalgia that’s surely fine to experience now and then, if only to remind us that maybe those old days weren’t so bad. But we aren’t those people anymore, and I don’t wish to go back to that foreign country anymore. (A no-prize for whoever gets that literary reference!) And the economics of energy, time, and attention are such that we only have resources for the immediate, not the distant.

When I entered NCSU in 1979, I kept in touch with a few friends from high school (some of whom were in my freshman classes) but by my sophomore year, I was in a new world with new friends. When I left college, it took longer to separate myself from that comfortable world, but I eventually landed in Rocky Mount and started a new life there. I left in 1988 and brought no one with me from my 4 years there. If email had been around then, how long would I have stayed attuned to the local gossip, the dramas? I don’t know. Given my state of mind and emotions at the time, I would probably have kept up an unhealthy level of attachment. It was good for me that email and FB weren’t around back then.

Instead, I did (and still do) as Lavers suggested: I wrote letters. Letters to friends served as my journal, my writing practice, my meditation time. These days, with so little time available to me to get into the mindset that letter-writing demands, I send cards instead. I even send them to friends to who live nearby. There’s something just more special and personal to me when I see an envelope with a stamp and a handwritten address. I think it’s special enough to send to dear friends and I do it simply because I enjoy it. I don’t expect reciprocity or obligation–that’s not the reason to write to friends who’ve stood the test of time. One does it because of love and attachment and, I think, creative expression. Selfish reasons, ultimately, but delightful ones, as well.

Unit Structures

LONDON - FEBRUARY 03: (FILE PHOTO) In this ph...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Fred Stutzman is a PhD student at SILS and the creator of numerous good things, among them ClaimID and the Mac-based Freedom (which I used today to good effect).

He has a blog, Unit Structures, and tends to post announcements of upcoming events or good ‘n’ chewy postings related to his research interests of social networking and social software.

I liked today’s post very much, which ties into one of my favorite aphorisms, from Louis Pasteur: “Opportunity favors the prepared mind.” The lesson is that although passion for your product can pull you through the low times, you still need basic presentation skills if you want to be heard. My favorite line:

Notably, the research found that having taken public speaking lessons was a significant factor, indicating that communication skill, if not passion, was still important.

Digression 1: I’ve wondered about teachers who don’t take public speaking or presentation classes or workshops — or at the very least, some kind of vocal training. I know from the years I spent acting in amateur theater that a good voice was rare, but your own voice and presentation could be developed and made stronger. Certainly, professors get years of practice at speaking that most people who go to Toastmasters don’t get, but still — even in the classroom, it’s all about presentation.

Whenever Facebook is in the news, Fred usually has a considered and contextual opinion on the issue, with a prescription for how FB should move forward from this. Facebook’s recent misfire with its Terms of Service elicited a good-sized posting, with this as my favorite passage:

Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook as if it was a country. If Facebook were a country, it would more accurately resemble North Korea or China than the United States.

Fred also weighed in on the 25 Things meme that tagged all of us on FB, but uses it as a meditation on the phenomenon of refreshing or renewing dormant connections. I’m certainly seeing more people from my college years appearing on FB and connecting with me (or me touching base with them), and other friends are seeing high school chums reaching out to them. Fred wonders about the value of this activity:

We’ve all had the email or telephone reconnection with an old friend – after you have the getting-reacquainted conversation, is it really practical to re-integrate the individual into your life? More often than not, it simply isn’t practical (especially if geographic distance is a factor). This doesn’t take away from the wonder of reconnection and the warm feeling it produces – it just means that mediating technologies don’t change everything. Our everyday needs and processes exist higher up in the hierarchy of needs, and reconnection and maintenance of an extended social network is time-consuming.

Digression 2: I am, in fact, wondering how many of my current “cohort” at UNC I’ll be in touch with after the next 2 years. When I think of the places I’ve lived and worked, I’ve actually carried very few people with me from those places. When I left a job, I left my co-workers there. The time we spent was productive and intense and, I hope, enjoyable, but it wasn’t lasting, and the space I left behind was quickly filled.

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