There’s only one nerd-magnet movie that matters this summer: X2: X-Men United.

• Official movie website
• Official comic website
• IMDB entry
• Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star: “Sequel Undergoes Its Own Evolution”
• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times: “Dumb, but good.”
• Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal & Constitution: “More X-citing Than the First Film”
• Stephen Hunter, Washington Post: “Missing a Why, It Spawns Zzzzs”
• Glenn Lovell, San Jose Mercury News: “Big, Noisy, Chaotic, and About 30 Minutes Too Long”
• A. O. Scott, New York Times: “Good vs. Evil, With Marvelous Muscles”
• Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: “Sleek and Sexy with Delicious Characters and Effects”

Update: 10:09 I’m at home now. Not really happy with the way this entry turned out. I’ll work on it some more tomorrow, perhaps, with alterations clearly visible. I thought it would be fun to play with the conventions of posting by drawing attention to the place from which I was writing and the time limit that was imposed upon me. And class had just ended when I began my entry. Eh. More later. If you read this before I update the entry again, feel free to make comments.

I have a bit more than 7 minutes to write this entry. Tonight my graduate seminar met at local coffeehouse Muddy’s (the one on 39th Street) to discuss the section of Lev Manovich‘s The Language of New Media entitled “What is New Media?” Muddy’s has a computer in the back: 8 minutes for $1. I was inspired to provide them with this selection as a result of the earlier conversation with Matt, Chuck, and Jason in which Manovich’s name came up.

In general, my students seemed to disagree with most of Manovich’s claims for the nature of new media. I don’t have time to outline them all (5:40), but they were particularly troubled by his assertion that the only aspect of “cultural communication” that print affected was “distribution,” while “the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage and distribution” (39). Many of these stages, they argued, were significantly affected by print.

Students also questioned Manovich’s assertion of the “numerical representation” of new media. What about Morse code, one student asked. Isn’t this numerical? It’s binary.

Automation: What about the Jacquard looms? Weren’t they automated? Perhaps their product is not really a communicative medium.

1:50

Perhaps it’s the combination of all of these elements that Manovich wants to emphasize with new media. Well, the general consensus of my students seems to be that

• He doesn’t place enough emphasis upon print.
• He is not critical enough of the shortcomings and potential threats of new technology.

30 seconds! Must post!

Nice weekend: Gin and tonic. Backyard picnic table. Friends and kids. Tire swing. Starting to feel normal again after an academic year of rushing around.

This summer I’d like to get back in the gym. Less caffeine. More yoga. Better sleep. Maybe investigate that Buddhist temple that’s not too far from my apartment.

Tonight I’m thinking about plans for summer. A part of the summer will be prepping for classes next year so that I can get more of my research done during the year while I’m teaching. In my head I’m already re-tooling my early British lit course for the fall and thinking about my eighteenth-century novel course. It will be interesting, I think, to configure my classes like games. I don’t mean games in the “this is all fun and games” sense, but rather in the “here are the rules and here is how you can score points and let’s enjoy this” sense. More on this as I think it through

In this vein, I gave this semester’s students the option of playing Ivanhoe, an online literary game. Two of them took me up on the offer and took a stab at reworking Beowulf, but I think it takes more than two players for the game to be effective. They enjoyed it, though. Now that I have Movable Type set up, it will be a better environment for the game than the MSN Groups forum that we were using.

There are a few articles in various stages of development that I plan to complete and get out to the journals this summer.

I’m also making plans to travel to Maryland to take part in the English department‘s graduation ceremony. I received my Ph.D. last summer, but there are only ceremonies at the end of fall and spring semesters. So L and I will “graduate” at the same time, which was our plan all along.

While in Maryland I’ll meet with some Romantic Circles folks to discuss (and do a bit of work on) the art gallery project we have in the works.

Air fare for my summer research trip to England still looks reasonable. I’m hesitating to commit to buying a ticket, and I’m not sure why. (I need to get on it before prices start going up.) A little bit of nervousness about arranging all the details, I suppose. I haven’t traveled internationally since 1989, when I went to visit my parents in Belgium the year before they finally moved back to the states. I guess I feel a bit rusty. I need to re-contact the Methodist Archive Research Centre and make sure they’re still okay with me coming. This will be a good trip, once I get over my mild performance anxiety.

As I wrote earlier, in July I’ll be going to California for SHARP, and I’m very much looking forward to that.

It would be nice to keep my computing skills sharp: PHP, text-encoding, image editing, maybe learn some more-than-rudimentary Perl. Maybe put Linux on my laptop.

I’m fantasizing about writing grant applications this summer to support work on my book, another research trip, maybe an ambitious digitization project. Fingers crossed.

And somewhere in the midst of all of this, I’d like to visit family and friends, who are spread out in a variety of places: Georgia, New York, Texas. We’ll see.

Continue reading →

Is it accurate to call print an information technology?

I ask this question because my work concerns, among other things, the effects of print upon eighteenth-century Britain, and I’m uncertain if what is going on in this earlier period is part of the same historical narrative that includes the impact of the Internet, say, on contemporary life. I used to say yes, but now I’m not so confident.

Print presents information, but it doesn’t process it or reprocess it in response to input from the user, which seems to be one of the defining characteristics of information technology.

I’m willing to argue about it. Can anyone refer me to a source that considers this question?