Success

And with only very minor revisions!


Jess made the shirt. It says "Helen C. is my (Ex-) Lover." Wait 'till she finds out I have my eye on a lover named Baker Hall...

Anxiety

It's been an anxious day. Tomorrow I defend my dissertation. What can I do to prepare? I wrote some notes for a response to my chair's opening question. Beyond that, I have to think on my feet. As with my last post, I have some ideas to work out and so i hope to use that to my advantage.

Good news, though... and bad. I realized last week that the course I studied will be at Wounded Knee the day I defend. This was one of the sites where student journals really took off as a result of "serious play". However, as with the '05 trip, the wakinyans paid Shannon & Bennett Counties a visit. There is no doubt they had to seek shelter as did we in '05. I hope everyone is safe. I will be thinking of them tomorrow.

Phinished (Almost, that is...)

What I mean is that I got final drafts of my dissertation to committee members today. I had to stand around and make 1240 copies, essentially. Then, I had to deliver them across campus. 3 in my home department, 1 across the street (but up 3 flights, down a state agency corridor and into the "secret" faculty lounge), and one about 6 blocks away. Not too bad, really. I just hope everyone can give it a good read between now and 7 June. I expect revisions, but no great overhauls - mostly the last chapter, It's difficult to put it all on the line: where do tepid claims depart from carefully worded limitations of your study? Where does crowing about your work turn into grand exuberance?


Anyway, there are last minute things and methods that really helped put it all in perspective, so I can't really complain about spending the extra week to smooth things out. Plus, my horoscope was really spot on for this week. Whew! Now to grade my students' papers... oh, shit, I only have until midnight tomorrow! :)

Happy? Birthday Helvetica

Yes, fonts have birthdays. Helvetica, the font of choice for the modern(ist) age is now 50 years old. Yes, the font for neo-fascists enjoys its golden days in an appropriate age. It's so sleek, so efficient, so easy to read, so... everywhere. It even has its own film.

We composition(ists) don't often talk much about typeface, but we should. I know, I know, computer and writing folks have been talking about fonts for a while now and *everybody* has the disclaimer on their syllabus to use one of the "appropriate" fonts like Times New Roman but NOT like Wiesbaden Swing Dingbats. But we really haven't theorized fonts, have we? Graphics are so much more cool.

But sometimes we need that Buffy the Vampire Font to make our point, to persuade our audience that this is really a cool thing we're doing. Of course, it can backfire, too. Fonts are to content like dress is to a speaker's ethos, n'est-ce pas?

Given Fleckenstein's argument that literacy involves image and word, what better place to start than looking at how font use signals a particular relation to the subject, composing or composed? What about Wysocki's "I Can See Clearly Now: The Visible Form of Academic Texts and the Invisible Form of the Subject." It's been eleven years since she made that point, so maybe we should revive it. It seems to connect typeface to larger social flows of power and desire, so maybe we can get a critical angle on what we do when we provide appropriate versus inappropriate fonts or when we say explore fonts in this part of the course, but not in this other part.

Anyway, happy birthday fonts everywhere. No exceptions.

Gender Bias in Language Research?

On the WPA-L, someone sent around the link to The Gender Genie, a program that uses an algorithm to determine if the author of a text was male or female. First of all, I think the whole thing is hugely dubious. It is based on statistical analysis of the British National Corpus, so there is nothing remotely innate about the correlation between gender and "the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers" (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, Shimon [.pdf document]). The conclusions are rightly stated as "socialization of gender."

However, even this claim needs to be tempered. I ran my own little test using the Gender Genie. When submitting blocks of text, one must choose the type of text it is from broad genre categories of fiction, non-fiction, or blog. Since I don't really have a great deal of fiction to submit, I first took a piece of this blog and ran it through the Genie. It claimed the author was female. As a comparison, I took a piece of my dissertation. It claimed the author was male. Why the difference?

It maybe that the samples I submitted were too short. The blog was 289 words and the section of my dissertation was 382 words. So, I ran another test, this time with a different blog entry and a different section of my dissertation. They were 816 and 900 words, respectively. I achieved the same results with these samples as with the first test. My blog entry was seen as "female" and my dissertation was seen as "male."

My dissertation discusses theory and empirical data while my blog tends to remain more theory oriented. However, I would think this would actually score a difference the other way around with real experience scoring as more "feminine," assuming the Gender Genie reinforces the stereotype of abstract discourse as a penchant for males and experiential or intuitive discourse as something innately female. Moreover, since both blog entries and my dissertation involve academic thinking about discourse, the fact that any difference was detected strikes me as patently odd.

Now, to be fair, my dissertation involves more conclusive theorizing than the two blog entries I used previously. So, I ran a third test, this time involving only one strongly argued (and firmly believed) blog entry since we know the dissertation is "male." Based on only 441 words, mind you, the Gender Genie found this one to be "male" as it did my dissertation.

Conclusions? Beyond that the Gender Genie is absolute bunk (like you needed me to tell you)? That what is being measured here are stereotypes. The dissertation sections and the lone blog entry that scored as male did so because of the conviction and assured manner in which they were argued, not the more tentative and speculative manner of my blog entries. As such, the algorithm picks out a degree of certainty with which the author uses language to relate the reader to the subject matter being written. That is it. There is another step required to make the leap from that measure to the conclusion that these are indicative of the ways in which British or even Western societies socialize along gendered lines. The authors of the Gender Genie makes that step, equating a self-assured manner of writing with gender characteristics. But, in doing so only reinforces sexist stereotypes about women's and men's ways of writing.

Don't believe me? As a final check, I ran two more texts: Gwen Ifill's op-ed about Don Imus' derogation of the Rutger's women's basketball team and this blog entry. Ifill's op-ed that took Imus to task was 765 words and was seen as male. This entry? 618 words and written by a male.

Hyperides Speaks!

It is amazing that someone who lived in the Classical Greek world wrote something down, and that, despite his words being abraded off to use as parchment for medieval writing, the text still exists! Apparently, philosophers are going over the commentary on Aristotle here (requires Windows Media Player so Mac folks like me are SOL). Hyperides wrote about Aristotle's taxonomy and classification of animals, so there may be important contributions not only for philosophers of science, but also for those interested in the rhetoric of science and nature. Stay tuned!

VTech, Violence, and Writing

As the news trickles out about the killings at VTech, I know we are all pretty saddened, shocked and alarmed. For me, I find it disturbing that Cho Seung-Hui had written extensively for his courses as an English major and that he even was referred to counseling by his writing teacher. These things hit real close to where I spend a good part of my day, a day I often share with many like you.

So, I want to ask what our response might be at this time. We might think about revisiting some scholarship that has been published on dealing with violence in writing. I can't remember the title of it, but I recall an article about a piece of writing that described beating up a homeless man. It turned out to be fiction, but the teacher's response and thinking about appropriate action was really insightful. This may be a good place to start.

We may even look at Cho's writing. Distasteful as it may seem, it is posted online. We may ask what separates it from other writing that is also predicated on violence or just ask what we would do if a student handed in something like it in our courses.

My hope is that we can at least take an opportunity to inform ourselves on the possible situations we face as instructors.

So, I guess I am open to suggestions or ideas at this point and have a lot of questions about how to make this happen. If you have an article, a suggestion, a clue, or word of wisdom, please share! All I ask is that this not turn into rampant theorizing or polemicizing. Please keep the politics to a minimum.

Dvd