<< Bill the Butcher As Educator | Front Page | Culture, like booze (and still a public good) >>
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Trackback Test - doth you sometimes appear as doth the blushing discontented sun?
See, see, King Richard doth himself appear,
As doth the blushing discontented sun
From out the fiery portal of the east,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory and to stain the track
Of his bright passage to the occident.
What I’m trying to say is that, of late, the trackback function of this blog has been dysfunctionally beclouded. Now it’s fixed. Please resume your rightful bright passage to glory. Just to be sure, let’s declare this an open-trackback post. Drop a line - via trackback - about any old valvish thing you are doing. If you experience technical difficulties, notify us in comments.
Let me test functionality in the opposite direction by tracking back to Matthew Yglesias’ brief post on resistance to vagueness. (I’m planning to follow up on this, but I’ll just link for now.)
The rest of you: how about thoughts on how our book event schemes can be improved in a formal sense? How should we set things up to best effect? Spread things out so the newscycle pace is less arduous? More structure? Less? Maybe do it once a week, seminar style? What do you think?
Comments
How can your book event scheme be improved? Well, I’m clearly not part of your target audience, but of course I have an opinion.
I don’t think that spreading things out would really help. I tend to keep an eye on the “most recent comments” bar to the lower left of the page, and I haven’t noticed any additional comments on old TE posts after their initial burst, notwithstanding your plea for the departed. So that would dilute the event-ness of the event and not get you much in return, is my guess.
I also don’t think a weekly event would work. Too much effort to be sustained so often. Once a month sounds like the minimum spacing, but even that’s pushing it. I’d guess that four times a year would be about right for events of this scale.
What I would have liked to see (again: I’m not your target audience) is more structure. It seemed like there were a good number of posts about the overall clash between theory and anti-theory, and a good number that concerned individual essays from TE. What was missing was any kind of comprehensive treatment: posts looking at the individual subject areas of the book. Or more comparative posts saying that this essay’s good, these others in the same area are not, here’s why.
I can see why more structure would be really hard to do, given that you’re depending on volunteer labor, and since each person involved naturally wants to write only about their key idea. Since people tend to be interested in similar things, getting a group of volunteers to each write about what most interests them will have very spotty coverage of an overall work (although that coverage will be focussed on the concensus most interesting parts, so maybe that’s OK). It certainly seemed difficult, watching from outside, for you to implement even the basic type of structure involved in having people tell you about their posts on other sites.
So my suggestion is to turn your students loose on it. Many of you are professors; you presumably have bright students who might be looking to do something like this. Or you could even assign it as a class project of some sort. And those people you really could assign different areas of a work to; for TE, you could have divided the thing up into its sections, and had a student sign up for each. Then present the student work in a seperate, structured Web tree of some sort.
Of course the student work would presumably not be as good overall. (Although, you know, SEK is a student). But maybe you’d discover new talent. And it would insure that all parts of a work were at least ploddingly covered.
Maybe that wouldn’t work as well for books that weren’t collections of essays. But the first two books that you’re doing are, so maybe that’s going to be fairly common.
Rich, I’m sorry, but obviously, like it or not, you’re part of our target audience: you’re interested enough in the subject of literature that you’re willing to read this despite your irritation. You may even be part of our target authorship.
John, my test trackback got through, I see, but it’s the only one. As a programmer, I know that “zero, one, or more than one” is a very different thing from “zero or one”. Can you try one yourself to make sure we make it to two (which, as a programmer, I know is equal to “anything more than one")?
Ray, I just meant that I’m not an academic, a philosopher, or a literary studies person. Given that John Holbo seems to have some plans for these book events that involve changing the salience of blogging within literary studies, the kind of thing that I’d like to see may not be relevant, even though I’m interested enough to read the Valve regularly.