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On Being Too Busy to Blog
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Half of European men share King Tut’s DNA
Just what we need: half of Europe and all of Britain believing they have a divine right to Egypt.
Up to 70 percent of British men and half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, geneticists in Switzerland said.Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III, based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel.The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 percent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.Among modern-day Egyptians this haplogroup contingent is below 1 percent, according to iGENEA.
via Half of European men share King Tut\’s DNA | News by Country | Reuters.
Thanks to Flujan over at My Voyage through Time for pointing me to these adventures in historical genealogy.
Stories about Digital Literacy: a literary sub-genre?
There’s a very long history of memoirs about reading and literacy. Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory is one of the signature works in my own life on this theme, but there are a bunch of others. Before I entered administration I was pondering an essay on this theme as a particular sub-genre. The tale of awakening to words, of becoming so absorbed by stories that you no longer had time for friends, or that books became your friends, your parents worry, the suspicion that there is something wrong with you, the thrill of finding the one or two other people in your adolescence who can share a love for the printed page.
There’s a nice entry on Digital Literacy over at ivry twr that has some of the same features, and I realized I wasn’t really familiar with stories of coming to digital literacy in quite the same way.
Are there other such stories out there? Are the memories of our engagement with screen and keyboard a literary sub-genre? I’m actually truly intrigued and interested, so if you can point me to them I’d love to have a look.
A short excerpt from the post:
I still remember my grandfather’s first computer. It was a Pentium 486 that ran Windows 3.1. Murmurs in the family said that he paid nearly $3000 for it. My grandfather has (and continues to be) someone who enjoys the latest and greatest gadgets. We visited my grandparents regularly and I was allowed largely unsupervised time with the computer. I quickly discovered a number of computer games on his hard drive and from that point on all my memories of that computer revolve around Wolfenstein 3D and Cosmo.
My first experience with the internet didn’t come for a few more years. One day my uncle was visiting with his company laptop. He told my parents about something called the internet that would let you search for anything. He plugged his laptop into our phone line and before long we were online.
My family sat me down in front of it and told me to search for something. Being around 10 or 11 at the time, I searched for “toys.” Some things about the internet never change. Instead of the Transformers or Lego that I was expecting, I was greeted with page after page of every sex toy imaginable. My parents quickly closed the laptop.
Accessing the Rethinking Success Conference
Wake Forest has done an exceptional job, I think, of creating this conference as a resource for the academic community at large. The goings-on of the conference can be accessed in realtime through Twitter at #rethinkingsuccess, which they are using as a Storify version of the conference. (John Fea and I are cited several times, so happy to contribute to the view of what going on). But they are also doing a good job of getting the word out in other ways.
Andy Chan from Wake Forest is compiling a record of the conference at his blog, and there you can access video interviews with the main speakers as well as summaries of the sessions.
There’s also been some good press, with an Inside Higher Ed report this morning.
Finally, Wake has provided a great resource page that examines these issues through linked articles and essays–a bibliography of the main issues according to the topic.
Kudos to Wake for providing a great service to the academic community.
Interview with Andrew Delbanco: Students, you have saved others, now save yourselves
Following up on my recent posts on Andrew Delbanco (here, here, and here), there’s an interesting interview with Delbanco on the Chronicle of the Higher Education as part of their Afterwords series, speaking further about his recent book:
Andrew Delbanco Interview–Chronicle of Higher Education
Mostly Delbanco covers the same territory here, and again, I admire his ideals. I remain struck, though, by the way in which he puts the onus on students to resist the commercialization of college life. Again, I wonder, why is it up to students to do this. Don’t they, most of them, end up working with an overwhelmingly overdetermined system, hopelessly recognizing that a college or university degree is necessary for their success in life, and realizing at the exchange of several tens of thousands of dollars in debt they are being offered a chance at a reasonably secure existence. How can it be up to college students to resist this commercialization when college and university life is so thoroughly commercialized from the moment of the transaction–through admissions decisions that consider the ability to pay, to financial aid offerings, to debt loads, to student jobs necessary for paying basic expenses. What student could avoid understanding that there is a deeply commercial angle to the transaction.
Note, I am not saying the commercialization of higher education should not be resisted, but it seems peculiar to me to put emphasis on the need for students to do this. The question ought to be, how do we change the structures of higher education that are making the commercialization of their education inevitable.
That is a tougher nut to crack than pleading with undergraduates to resist pecuniary interests and take humanities majors anyway.
Our Data, Our Selves: Data Mining for Self-Knowledge
If you haven’t read Gary Shteygart’s Super, Sad, True, Love Story, I would encourage you to go, sell all, buy and do so. I guess I would call it a dystopian black comedic satire, and at one point I would have called it futuristic. Now I’m not so sure. The creepy thing is that about every other week there’s some new thing I notice and I kind of say to myself “Wow–that’s right out of Shteyngart.” This latest from the NYTimes is another case in point. The article traces the efforts of Stephen Wolfram to use his immense collection of data from the records of his email to the keystrokes on his computer to analyze his life for patterns of creativity, productivity, and the like.
He put the system to work, examining his e-mail and phone calls. As a marker for his new-idea rate, he used the occurrence of new words or phrases he had begun using over time in his e-mail. These words were different from the 33,000 or so that the system knew were in his standard lexicon.
The analysis showed that the practical aspects of his days were highly regular — a reliable dip in e-mail about dinner time, and don’t try getting him on the phone then, either.
But he said the system also identified, as hoped, some of the times and circumstances of creative action. Graphs of what the system found can be seen on his blog, called “The Personal Analytics of My Life.”
The algorithms that Dr. Wolfram and his group wrote “are prototypes for what we might be able to do for everyone,” he said.
The system may someday end up serving as a kind of personal historian, as well as a potential coach for improving work habits and productivity. The data could also be a treasure trove for people writing their autobiographies, or for biographers entrusted with the information.
This is eerily like the processes in Shteyngart’s novel whereby people have data scores that are immediately readable by themselves and others, and the main character obsesses continuously over the state of his data, and judges the nature and potential for his relationship on the basis of the data of others.
Socrates was the first, I think, to say the unexamined life was not worth living, but I’m not entirely sure this was what he had in mind. There is a weird distancing effect involved in this process by which we remove ourselves from ourselves and look at the numbers.
At the same time, I’m fascinated by the prospects, and I think its not all that different from the idea of “distanced reading” that is now becoming common through certain Digital humanities practices in literature, analyzing hundreds or thousands of novels instead of reading two or three closely in order to understand through statistical analysis the important trends in literary history at any particular point in time, as well as the way specific novels might fit in to that statistical history.
Nevertheless, a novel isn’t a person. I remain iffy about reducing myself to a set of numbers I can work to improve, modify, analyze, and interpret. The examined life leads typically not to personal policies, but to a sense of mystery, how much there is that we don’t know about ourselves, how much there is that can’t be reduced to what I can see, or what I can count. If I could understand my life by numbers, would I?
For Your edification I include the book trailer for Shteygart’s novel below.
The Pew Research Center Report on Reading and e-books: Reading More and Reading Less
The Huffington Post had a somewhat different take on the Pew Research Center Report concerning reading than I had in yesterdays post:
The surveys of 2,986 respondents, carried out in English and Spanish at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, also showed that the average (calculated by mean) American reads 17 books a year.
However, 19% of respondents aged 16 and over said that they hadn’t read a single book in any format, over the previous 12 months – the highest since such surveys on American reading habits began in 1978. If this figure is accurate, that means more than 50 million Americans don’t read books at all.
This is the typical fare of discourse of the reading crisis that I’ve commented on extensively elsewhere. In some ways it seems to me that this speaks to a kind of literacy divide–those who can concentrate and comprehend (or just tolerate) long-form texts and those who cannot. I am no longer completely sure we have a reading crisis in the abstract. I think in some respects people are reading more than ever. But I do think we have a concrete reading crisis in the sense that long form reading of many types is becoming harder to sustain.
The advantage of the codex, fewer distractions. The disadvantage of the codex, we are living in a world of distraction. One of Alex Juhasz’s insights at the Re:Humanities 2012 undergraduate conference a couple of weeks ago was that we have to figure out how to write for a world that is permanently distracted. Is this a better world? I doubt it. Is it a reality? I don’t know how to doubt that it is.
The question is, how may one write in to that world while also intervening and resisting its most fragmenting and distracting aspects. What kind of writing might both engage and accept distractedness while ultimately provoke focus and concentration or at least pointing to their possibility?
Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: Books in a pound of flesh
Among the other advantages of Twitter–besides finding out what famous people ate for breakfast–I discover knowledge that I find both nauseating and compelling. In his recent discourse on the history of the book at Messiah College, Anthony Grafton did not manage to get in to the arcana of book binding, else he may have filled us in a bit more on Anthropodermic Bibliopegy, a term I picked up via a tweet from the LA Times book review. From the blog the chirurgeon’s apprentice: a website devote to the horrors of pre-anaesthetic surgery:
The process of binding books using human flesh is known as ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’. One of the earlier examples dates from the 17th century and currently resides in Langdell Law Library at Harvard University. It is a Spanish law bookpublished in 1605. The colour of the binding is a ‘subdued yellow, with sporadic brown and black splotches like an old banana’. [1] On the last page, there is an inscription which reads:
The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma [possibly an African tribe from modern-day Zimbabwe, see below illustration]on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace. [2]
Although it seems macabre to our modern sensibilities, this book was rebound as a way of memorialising the life of Jonas Wright. In this way, it is similar to mourning jewellery made from the hair of the deceased and worn by the Victorians during the 19th century. It is a poignant reminder of the life that has been lost.
Poignant indeed, though I doubt I’ll be asking my wife if she would like a skin-covered book to remember me by. The post goes on to note.
Anthropodermic bibliopegy reached its height of popularity during the French Revolution, when a fresh supply of bodies was always available. All sorts of books were wrapped in human skins, including a collection of poems by John Milton. One of the last known books to be bound in this fashion dates from 1893 and currently resides at Brown University. The binder did not have quite enough skin for the book, and thus split the piece into two – the front cover is bound using the outer layer of skin; the back cover and spine are bound using the inner layer of skin.
If you didn’t know better, you would think it was suede.
Gives new meaning to the idea of “Kindle Skins.”
The latest from over at Digital Humanities at Messiah College
Kurt Vonnegut, Zombie Author–Or, I am the hype that I descry
I picked up via twitter yesterday that a Kurt Vonnegut novella that was twice rejected by major magazines has been published for the first time via Amazon singles. Dutifully, I downloaded the book and now have it available via my Kindle app on my iPad and ready for reading. Perhaps a review will be in the offing if I can get around to it. (If I would blog less, I’m sure I would read more.) The ways in which this leaves me feeling strange and uneasy requires a catalogue.
1. If the book has been rejected multiple times and Vonnegut in his later life never chose to publish it when he most assuredly could have, as an e-book or otherwise, why should I buy this book now. Is it because “it’s a Vonnegut,” and therefore worthy of my time. I think this must not be true since in the end Vonnegut didn’t think it was even worth his time. Am I somehow trading in a cult of celebrity in which the Vonnegut industry keeps pumping out the undead wisdom–even if the quality of the book might end up being something akin to a black velvet painting of Elvis being sold on the roadside beside a 7-Eleven in Arkansas. Somehow I think here of Foucaults inquiry in to what exactly constitutes the work of an author. I always kind of smiled at the question of whether an author’s laundry list is a part of his or her work. I am now wondering whether Vonnegut’s laundry lists will be imaged and sold online as amazon singles.
2. I haven’t read half of the Vonnegut that Vonnegut himself thought was worth publishing. Why should I purchase this latest for 1.99. Because its easy and I didn’t even have to leave my couch to do it? On the other hand, I have wasted a good bit more money than that on impulse purchases of literary magazines that now serve landfills, or perhaps could be fodder for Liz Laribee’s latest art project(the latter a worthy demise, I should say)
3. Should I really enrich Rosetta Books and Amazon.com in pursuit of Vonnegut’s ghost.
4. Is there a problem with the fact that the internet erases distinctions between ephemera and things of “enduring value”? What is the nature of “enduring value” when essentially everything can endure on an equal plane and theoretically in to eternity. ( I know here that my colleague Samuel Smith thinks the internet is more ephemeral than a paper book, but I have my doubts. If we really get to the point of apocalypse in which all our digital resources are essentially unavailable through some massive destruction of the grid, we won’t be reading our paper books either. We’ll be burning them in our fireplaces. Or cooking them in our soups.) The intellectual world is flat, and if Rosetta books had not chosen to publish the work, some enterprising graduate student with a scanner and an email account could have.
5. Is it a problem that in writing this blog post, linking to websites, retweeting GalleyCat missives, posting to Facebook, I am flogging a book that I haven’t even read, part of the industrial–internet–publishing complex that makes Kurt Vonnegut a Zombie Author who continues to fascinate and destroy. I am the hype that I descry.
Peter Kerry Powers 