Disintegration Loops

Thanks to Marc Ruppel for turning me on to these:

William Basinski’s four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and they were disintegrating as they played and as he recorded. As he notes in the liner notes, “The music was dying.” But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops.

. . . William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate. He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another. . . .

Stoa Blog

Ross Scaife’s long-running Stoa site now features a blog that will be of interest to any digital humanities reader.

We Took a Trip!

Last week we took a trip!

We stayed at a very nice hotel. They have a real live cat that lives right in the lobby and big, cushy bathrobes. Everyone was so friendly! Especially when they gave us the bill!

We went to a Museum and a Library and a Chelsea warehouse. K did some very important research at the Museum. We both looked at some very interesting (but strange) books they had on display at the Library. Then, in the warehouse, we got to ride a funny bike that was hooked up to some computer-type thingy that made it look like you were in virtual reality or something in a city all made out of letters. Cool!

Next we saw a show. It was big and loud and dumb and great. (Thanks Mom and Dad!)

We bought some fun games (well, really just for me!) and some nice (but strange) books.

And now we’re back!

Off the Grid

I’m going to be traveling and largely offline for the next week or so. May not see email until I get back. Details when I return . . .

Why Digital Studies?

Here’s something one of my grad students wrote over on the class blog:

I hope that the rest of my time as a student is as enriching as the last 2 semesters have been. I attribute the high quality of my experience to both the new material (new to me at least) that brings me to a new view of the world, and to the diversity of the students in the classroom. When we take a course on Shakespeare, the student group is genereally pretty homogenous. But this material, so relevant to various fields of study, is a great place to experience this wonderful cross-pollination (or maybe it is cross-contamination!) of ideas. Not only that, on some level, or in some area, we were all newbies. So there was less need to be the expert. We all had something to learn from each other.

It’s not every day I get that kind of feedback, and I’m grateful.

What the Cicadas Said

Work yourself up and sharpen you wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God. His existence had already been proved by the accordion, the landscape and soft words. * To impose one’s A.B.C. is only natural - and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a crystalbluff-madonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations, a naked leg being the invitation to an ardent and sterile Spring. The love of novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it’s evidence of a naive don’t-give-a-damn attitude, a passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this need is out of date, too. By giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity - novelty - we are being human and true in relation to innocent pleasures; impulsive and vibrant n order to crucify boredom. At the lighted crossroads, alert, attentive, lying in wait for years, in the forest.

Moved Type

The old default styles for MT < 3.0 (“Stormy,” “Gettysburg,” “Trendy,” etc.) are now nowhere to be found on movabletype.org. Or at least I didn’t find them after some dedicated looking.

The new styles don’t work with 2.6x templates. And the new templates (provided) don’t work with 2.6x period.

So already we see the erosion of the platitude, “if you’re happy with what you have there’s no need to switch or pay anything.”

Update: MovableStyle.com’s also moving.

Student Work Spring 2004

A sampling of work produced by students who opted for a digital project instead of the traditional term paper in my undergraduate Computer and Text course this spring. In no particular order:

• . . . drift, by Ananth Panagariya. “The cybertexts we discussed in class demand your time, but you can choose when you allot that time to a particular work. The idea here was to take that aspect of the user’s control away from them.”
  
• 618, by Emily Adamo. College roomies Trevor and Jeff get a little too deep into Andrew Plotkin’s Shade.
  
• disorder, by Erika Salomon. An experiment in spatial fiction.
  
• Peeling, by Noelle Wilson. A meditation on Shelley Jackson’s Skin.
  
• [Untitled], by Anastasia Salter. An exploration of the promise and perils of digital preservation.
  
• Ergodic Music, by Ann Kelchner. With particular reference to the works of John Cage.
  
• Love as Unifying Force, by Robbie Powers. Alan, Eliza, Grace, Ada . . . where have I heard those names before?

Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q

Anybody want to try to guess what’s distinctive about that phrase?

Applegeeks

Applegeeks is a cool anime-style Web comic written and edited by two of my current students, Ananth and Emily.

To Serve You Better

I don’t have anything substantive to add the hue and cry over MT’s new licensing policies, but I read the original announcement (in something called “Mena’s Corner”) three times through now and I still can’t make much sense of it, couched as it is in mushy gushy neo-corporate newspeak.

WTF? Talk to us like we’re adults, huh? We can take it.

Arts of Transmission

Just found out about this symposium, which has, like, a total rock-star line-up of speakers. There’s a link to papers buried below the fold, but before you get too excited it requires an institutional or indidividual subscription to Critical Inquiry. And I don’t know what that entails (in fact, it’s news to me that CI had an electronic component).

ARTS OF TRANSMISSION
A Discussion Conference
May 21-22, 2004

This event calls together experts from a range of disciplines—literature, sociology, anthropology, science studies, filmmaking, and more—to examine relationships among ideas and cultures of communication past and present. Today, authorship, reading, the concepts of information and communication themselves—the basic terms in which we think about creative work are changing beyond recognition. This conference will bring together new perspectives able to perceive common issues extending across otherwise deep historical, theoretical, and disciplinary rifts.

The University of Chicago
Swift Hall, 3rd Floor auditorium, 1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL

Please register if you would like lunch: franke-humanities@uchicago.edu

For more information, please call the Franke Institute for the Humanities at 773-702-8274

Put the Milk in First

In the course of his novel The Mezzanine, which I mentioned a few posts back, Nicholson Baker details the eight great advances of his (or at least his protagonist Howie’s) life. To wit: number four, brushing the tongue as well as the teeth. Or number seven, “ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make bill-paying more efficient” (perhaps soon to be outmoded in this age of electronic banking).

Were I to make such a list I know one item that would definitely be on it: put the milk in first. If you put the milk (or the cream) in first when pouring a cup of coffee it saves you the extra step of stirring it with a spoon, and the subsequent step of rinsing the spoon. Try it, you’ll see: the milk quickly and evenly blends with the coffee. I don’t know why this works—probably the question could be answered with some recourse to the modelling of complex fluid dyanmics, and in fact such questions are just Baker’s cup of tea (as it were). Anyway, work it does. And it’s a little something that helps me out each day.

N.B.: Sugar is an unknown variable in all this. I don’t take sugar in my coffee.

Anything that would be on your great advances list that you’d care to share?

New IATH Director

UCLA’s Bernard Frischer has been appointed the next director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH):

“It is an honor and challenge to be chosen to succeed John Unsworth, the first Director of IATH,” says Frischer. “Under John’s leadership, IATH established itself as the premier research center in the United States for digital humanities. It is my hope to build on the achievements of the past by helping to make digital humanities a sustainable and integral approach to humanistic research both at Virginia and at other major universities around the world.” (Press release here.)

Good luck to Professor Frischer as he assumes this key role in the international humanities computing community.

Lyman Award

Robert K. Englund has won the prestigious Lyman Award for scholarship in the digital humanities. Englund is Principal Investigator of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, and Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Full press release here.

The Lyman Award, together perhaps with the ACH/ALLC’s Roberto Busa Award, is the most prestigious honor of its kind. I know several other deserving people who were in the running this year, and so the competition was especially stiff—surely a sign of the overall health and vitality of the field. Congratulations to Professor Englund. Past winners of the Lyman include Jerome McGann and Roy Rosenzweig; past winners of the Busa include John Burrows.