HUIN305: Week 10

Hello all:

Just a reminder that HUIN305 will be meeting tomorrow, Wednesday March 4, at 10:15.

A number of you are preparing literature reviews and/or annotated bibliographies. Please send these and any and all new material that you have concerning the progress you're making on your projects out by this evening.

I'd like tomorrow's session to run like a true graduate seminar, i.e. with everyone providing comments on and constructive criticism about each other's projects.

For that to happen, you'll need to get your documents circulating in time for everyone to read them. In your email you might include questions or ideas that you'd like us to take up during the meeting. If there are materials to download from the course "My Space" that can't be send as attachments, let us know.

Also, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) website and group. Take a look at some of the project descriptions posted on the site; they might provide useful models or inspiration. As you write your proposals and eventually your research, you might think of this scholarly community, and/or some of the digital humanities sub-groups affiliated with the site, as one of your target audiences. In fact, you might be interested in joining the organization and, once your practical project is nearly compete, posting information about it there.

I suspect the HASTAC network would be pleased to have more members from outside North America, and through the forum you might just make some valuable professional contacts.

Finally, please bring an extra hard copy of your paper for me to keep.

See you in the a.m.

Ralph Ellison's Endless Revisions

Ralph Ellison's failure to publish a finished follow-up novel to Invisible Man during his lifetime has baffled critics and scholars of American literature. While a posthumous text, larger than Juneteenth, is imminent, the scholars who edited Ellison's volumes of writing into the forthcoming book to be published by the Modern Library suggest that Ellison's embrace of word-processing technology led Ellison to revise, repeatedly, already well-crafted sentences. Anyone fascinated as I am about how how technologies, particular the digital computer, alter the way we think and write will want to read The Invisible Manuscript, which contains something of a cautionary tale about writing with word-processing software: Computers make it easier to rework your writing, yes. But avoid the temptation to revise pepetually. Writers, particularly those with perfectionist tendencies, can get lost in syntactic detail and lose track of the larger project.