Good grief but it’s disheartening to look at today’s “five years ago” post and realize that I’m not only still asking many of the same questions, but also still need to look in many of the same places for the answers.

On the other hand, it’s nice to recognize that, given all the false starts and diversions it feels like I’ve encountered since the days of the INP, I was at least partly on the right track then, and things are moving forward in appropriate ways.

This post brought to you by my misplaced Protestant work ethic, which demands progress, progress, progress!

I eagerly anticipate at some as yet undetermined point in the future having a complex thought of which I do not later discover Jay David Bolter has already said a portion, both more intelligently and a decade earlier.

(I feel compelled, however, to note two attendant ironies:

1. The chapter on which I’m currently working makes as part of its argument the claim that one of the ideas about authorship that we’re going to need to loosen our grip on a teeny bit as we move into the digital future is that of originality.

2. One would think I’d already spent enough pages disagreeing with the notion of the anxiety of influence to suddenly find myself feeling it.)

Things have been a bit quiet around MediaCommons for a while, as we’ve been working behind the scenes on a major platform transformation that should be coming soonish. But there has been a little activity there of late, and in case you were looking the other way, I wanted to bring it to your attention.

The most significant thing is a very interesting and important post by Kari Kraus on citation systems for new media. Kari gives a bit of background on the problems that new media forms present for existing citation systems such as MLA and APA, and then follows with some of the research done by her Information Access in the Arts course this spring into various initiatives and proposals for renovating citation strategies into the future. Kari and her students are exploring a crucial set of issues for the future of academic discourse, as the ability to develop a systematic and yet flexible set of guidelines not just for referring to multimodal web-based sources but for ensuring the stability of those references will have an enormous impact on the ease with which scholars move into new modes of networked communication.

I raise a related issue in the comment I’ve left on her post, as well, one that I’ve discussed in a couple of classes recently: the unit of reference within the codex has long been the numbered page, through which I can get from your footnote to a relatively narrow chunk of text within which your reference lies in relatively direct and speedy fashion. But as we start reading texts in multiple new environments, moving from web to computer-based readers like Sophie to reading appliances like the Kindle, what new strategies will we need to develop in order to refer not only to the particular text we’re citing, but the particular spot in the particular text?

I had a positively spectacular work day on Tuesday, one of the first days in years on which I could say that I’d actually managed to accomplish way more than I’d expected. I hoped, of course, that this was the leading edge of a new wave of astonishing productivity, that I’d continue pressing forward at — thinking I was being reasonable — a rate perhaps slightly slower than that, and that I might have a hope of accomplishing at least half of what I set out to do this summer.

And then I woke up on Wednesday with a sore throat, which has today resolved into a fully clogged head. And productivity has all but ground to a standstill. Where I found myself ahead of the schedule by the end of the day Tuesday, I’m now well behind where I’d hoped to be by the end of Wednesday.

There’s not much to be done for it, I guess, except make some more tea, keep the kleenex handy, and try to think of the summer’s schedule as an exercise in non-attachment.

Earlier so-called communications revolutions wrought only partial transformations: the increased emphasis on the image in photography and film; the recovery of orality in telegraphy, telephony, and radio; the creation of mass consciousness through broadcasting. Though they began to challenge writing as the primary foundation of culture, these media did not affect the conditions of writing itself. This was good news for academics. It was possible to study just about any medium through the miracle of content — by which we meant, written representations of our experience of the other medium — without having to become much more than auditors or spectators. Among other things, this allowed the academy to draw a bright line between production work in various media (mere techne) and the writing of criticism and theory (the primary work of scholars).

With the coming of cybernetic communication systems — hypertext, the World Wide Web, soon now the Semantic Web — the conditions of all media are strongly transformed, and writing is clearly included.

from Stuart Moulthrop, After the Last Generation: Rethinking Scholarship in the Days of Serious Play.