Off the Mark

Minor update (22 Aug 05): Added Raghav’s last name now that our new website allowed me to stumble across it.

Been spending quite a bit of time in the Civil War lately, but I’m about to be done.  I can’t quite say the paper is finished but it’s oh so close.

Tomorrow I’ll print it out, give it a close re-reading, remove all the references to Appendix A that I just decided to give up on, fix anything needing fixing, reprint it and go put it in my professor’s mailbox and call it done.

Appendix A was some quantitative data from the 1876 Report that I was trying to restructure and present as another way of reflecting some of what was covered in the text.  But I just couldn’t figure out how to get the data presented well.  I guess I now know that’s a skill that needs a bit of work.  Well, so be it, just not for tomorrow.

It feels so damn good to be almost done with this paper.  Tomorrow I’ll have to do a little dance or something.  My real reward will be the ability to refocus my energies just in time to start a new semester on Wednesday.  But that is the future.

Right now, while writing this post, I’m finally watching my Elvis Costello and the Impostors Live in Memphis DVD that I bought months ago.

A long time ago, our point of view
Was broadcast by Mr. Bartholomew
Now the world is full of sorrow and pain
It’s time for us to speak up  again

You’re slack and sorry
Such an arrogant brood
The only purpose you serve is to bring us our food
We sit here staring at your pomp and pout
Outside the bars we use for keeping you out

You’ve taken everything that you wanted
Broke it up and plundered it and hunted
Ever since we said it
You went and took the credit
It’s been headed this way since the world began
When a vicious creature took the jump from Monkey to Man

Elvis Costello and the Impostors - "Monkey to Man" - The Delivery Man

I’m feeling sort of disconnected from the world after the past 2 weeks of concentrating on this paper.  I’ve been checking in on the blogs of importance to me and even leaving a comment here and there, but I don’t really feel like I’ve been able to actually "engage" much with anyone or any topic.  And I certainly don’t have anything to submit to the Carnival for this week.  Oh well. 

Maybe tomorrow I can find/re-find something of someone else’s to recommend.  Along with my own submissions, I have recommended at least one piece by someone else each week so far.  I think I’ll keep that as a goal.   Whether or not I have a piece of my own, I can support the efforts of others.

Everyone dreams of him just as they can
But he’s only a humble Delivery Man

Elvis Costello and the Impostors - "The Delivery Man" - The Delivery Man

Did a little CSS coding at work this past week.  Had to restructure a few pages for an online syllabus and I think they turned out OK.  I’d like to get a little more aggressive and remove the few remaining tables but the sort of CSS positioning required to do that is a serious hair-pulling exercise.  I’m looking forward to doing more so I can brush back up and learn even more CSS/HTML/XHTML.

I think I mentioned a while back that I was starting a new job this week.  Except it was part of my old job, just more of it.  I hung up the "help everyone in the department, no matter where they are with any computing problem, no matter what" shoes for a hopeful serious reduction in my stress levels.  Now I’ll just be broadcasting our distance ed classes and doing related projects.  I was doing that already as part of my previous assistantship so I’ll just be doing more of it.

In fact, I’ll be broadcasting 5 classes this fall:

• LIS 403LEA Lit and Resources for Children
• LIS 452LE Foundations of Info Processing in LIS
• LIS 501LEA Info Organization and Access
• LIS 507LEA and LEB Cataloging and Classification I (both sections)

I volunteered for most of these.  I’m hoping that hanging out with Dave Dubin in 452 will allow some of his IS goodness rub off on me.  And please keep in mind that there are very few people who could ever cause me to construct a sentence with "IS goodness" in it.

I also volunteered to do the two sections of cataloging.  I figure it can’t hurt to have this stuff just sort of filtering into my brain, and it may even help me retain a few things until I can take Advanced Cataloging myself in the spring.

501 should be quite interesting from a technical perspective, but I need to ask before I can say anything about the particulars.  The other "interesting" thing about it is that it’ll be huge; over 60 students!

Oh, I guess I should give a shout-out to some of my friends who are now officially librarians due to August graduations.  So without further ado:

Jaclyn Bedoya - thanks for including me!
Jasmit Chilana - Chillax dude!  Hope I can look you up if I ever get to Vancouver, BC
Dan Freeman - good luck with whatever you do
Sarah McHone-Chase - good luck Sarah; the only person I knew pre-GSLIS
Emily Rogers - Congrats my friend!  Have I said how happy I am that you’re staying?

Oh, I shouldn’t forget Raghav Rajagopalan the Architect - Congrats & good luck with the job search!

Raghav was a co-worker of mine in User Services.  On the way home from our old boss’s place this past Monday eve where he’d had a Hail & Farewell for those of us leaving and the new folks, Raghav and I were talking about writing papers (imagine me talking about writing a paper right now) and he helped me come to a realization that I hadn’t quite made conscious till then.  I certainly knew it.  I just couldn’t say it.

It seems that how I write is still under transformation so it’s difficult to think about sometimes.  But I had been thinking about how some papers are just more or less a chore and that you have to crank them out and be done with them, and how writing others is more of a learning process than the preparing to write.  This most recent paper was the former; not really much of a chore in the negative sense luckily, but the only reason I seemed to be learning anything during the writing is because I was still researching.  Of course, I much prefer the latter type and have written a few like that.  The writing process generated so much quality learning that you almost didn’t want to be done with them.

So what’s the difference?  Well, for me anyway (and Raghav), it is because most papers are little more than constructions of lots of bits from here and there put into a coherent narrative structure.  Doing the research is the learning part.  And sometimes that can be quite substantial; such as my paper on the Civil War and American printing and publishing, reading, and libraries.  I learned quite a bit about the nature of American society—in particular publishing, reading and libraries—from about 1825-1900, among other related topics.  But the only thing I learned from the writing was about how and where I am in my paper writing style nowadays.

The papers I have really learned the most from in the process of writing them, not in the research, are ones in which I engaged one, or a very small number of sources.  It took serious analysis and synthesis of the limited sources to produce something of quality.  So while much was learned from the reading/research, even more was learned in the process of writing thanks to the structure of the assignment.

Would you care for some examples?

Ellul and Perrow on the "adapted man"
Todorov on totalitarianism
Baumgartner on moral minimalism

Technically these are essays for 2 different final exams and are not "papers," as such.  But they represent what I was discussing above.  While I learned a lot going through this material the first time for class, I learned a vastly greater amount from the process of analysing and synthesizing it into something that was more than the sum of its constituent parts for the essays.

The papers I wrote for these classes were called "book review essays," but were really nothing of the osrt; or maybe I should so that they were, but were also so much more.  Imagine "reviewing" DeLillo’s White Noise or  Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being as examples of lived morality. 

Here’s the description for the course in which I wrote the "reviews" of those 2 books:

Drawing upon work in anthropology, history, literature, literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, this course attempts to situate contemporary morality in its larger historical and cultural context. The aim is less to analyze the theoretical morality of philosophers and theologians, than it is to interpret the morality that people actually live out in everyday life even when placed in extreme situations. This course, moreover, explores the possibility that contemporary morality is undergoing a radical transformation.

The above final exam essays on Todorov on totalitarianism and Baumgartner on moral minimalism were for this course, also.  Sorry, you’re not getting either of my papers for now.  They are long and are in Word, and it is a royal bitch to convert to HTML, especially blog HTML.  I know, I know.  It shouldn’t matter.  But if you think TypePad is generating valid HTML; well, don’t.  If anyone is really interested (and I don’t really expect anyone to be) let me know and I might email it to you.

The above essays, at least taken as a whole final, represent some of the writings of which I am proudest.  Just me and a few sources.  The nice thing about the essays for the final was that we only had to cite direct quotes or outside material, of which other than a few Ani songs, there really was no need to use.  So one was rarely distracted by the machinery of the citation process.  Yes, it is important.  You’ll get no argument from me on that; but it does often get in the way of thought processes that could be better utilized for learning rather than reproducing the structuress of learning.

Ani DiFranco and lived morality? Certainly!  Actually, I could find an Ani song for most any topic, but lived morality or the topic of the other seminar I took for a grade with Dr. Stivers, technology and modern society, are both just too easy.  Or maybe it was hard because there are so many great, and applicable, Ani songs for those two topics.

Oh well, on that note it is time for bed.   I fear this has already rambled much further afield than intended.  And Elvis was over a long time ago.

And the best is yet to come….

Lambchop - My Blue Wave  - is a woman