west of the moon

Fall 2007 Courses

I've mentioned my courses already, but in case anyone's interested, the course websites are up and running.

• History 30A: The History of Premodern Science
• History 103S/103D: Science and Fiction in Twentieth Century America

If any Berkeley students are reading and are interested in taking either of these classes, welcome!  History 30A is currently full, but we expect that all students on the waitlist will eventually be able to enroll.  Enrollment for the History 103 seminars requires the approval of Leah Flanagan ([email protected]) in the History Department, but don't be put off by that--non-majors are welcome to enroll.  For both courses, if you're interested in the course but haven't been able to enroll yet, you should still attend this week.  Thanks!

(Also, quick note to everyone else: it looks like the post office may have lost a bunch of mail that arrived while I was on vacation last week.  I've been talking with them about ways to track the mail down, and I've contacted everyone who I -know- was sending me mail, but if you sent me something by postal mail between, say, 10 August and 20 August, you shouldn't necessarily assume that it arrived safely.)

oh wow.

This started out as a slow morning--I puttered around a little with making coffee and washing dishes and whatnot before sitting down to check my email.  As a result, it took me a little while to find out about the World Fantasy Award nominations, and to figure out why I had email from people congratulating me for something.

This is... amazing, really.  Twenty Epics is nominated in the anthology category, and I've been nominated in the "Special Award, Non-Professional" category for my work with Strange Horizons.   I feel like I should have something else to say here, but really, I'm just going about my day in a cheerful kind of haze.  This was completely unexpected, and really lovely, and I think it hasn't fully sunken in yet.

It's a great ballot, overall.  I'm glad to see Christopher's and Ben's stories on there, both of which I loved, and to see Mary Rickert, who's one of my favorite writers these days.  (No insult implied to any of the other fiction represented, I just haven't read a lot of it.)  And John Klima!  And Gary Wolfe!  There's a reason that people always say it's an honor to be nominated. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to go to the awards ceremony--World Fantasy conflict with the History of Science Society annual meeting, again.   But still, this is so exciting.

Strange Horizons Fund Drive

The Strange Horizons fund drive has only about five days left before it ends.  (We've extended it once already, we're not extending it again.  It's over next Wednesday.)  We're currently about $2000 short of our goal.  That's not an impossible amount of money to raise in the time given, but it's a really difficult amount, given that it took us over five weeks to get the $4000 that we already have.

There's something interesting about the non-profit fund-drive model: in some ways, it's not primarily about the money.  It's about the support.  The money is important, certainly.  Our fund drive goal represents about a third of our annual operating budget.  But fund drive participation is also an indicator of community support, which is a key factor in raising the -rest- of our operating budget.  We have a lot of other indicators of community support, or at least of community appreciation--our readership numbers are good, and we're getting award nominations and critical notice.  (It was recently pointed out that four of the last five Campbell Award recipients were published in Strange Horizons before becoming Campbell winners, which sounds to me like we're doing a good job with our goal of finding and supporting talented new authors.)   But I think people don't realize the extent to which fund drives are a show of support as much as anything else.  That's partly our fault.  We talk about the lovely gifts and prizes, and we compare a Strange Horizons donation to a magazine subscription, because both of those tactics allow us to feel a little bit more comfortable with the fact that we're asking for money.  None of us are professional fundraisers, and we all hate asking for money. 

We are, in fact, asking for money.  We're asking for money as a way of asking for a demonstration that you like what we're doing.  In essence, it comes down to one simple thing: are you glad that Strange Horizons exists?  Even if you don't read us regularly, even if you don't like everything we do, even if you hate being asked for money.  Would you miss us if we were gone?  We're the longest-running online science fiction magazine, we have a proven track record of publishing quality fiction and nonfiction, we've made a web-publishing model work.  Our staff members, all of whom are making time for this work in the spaces between everything else in their lives, have been making this magazine happen, week after week after week, for almost seven years.  And we're hoping to continue, in our reviews and columns, to show how science fiction isn't dying, it's thriving, in movies and comic books and television shows and on the internet.  Even if you don't actively read the magazine, there are a lot of reasons to be happy that we exist.

Would you miss us if we were gone?

If the answer is yes, you should seriously consider coming over to our fund drive page and sending us some money.  It doesn't have to be a lot of money!  But it's the best and most tangible way to say to us, yeah, we're happy you're there, and we'd miss you if you were gone.  And to everyone who's already donated, thank you, thank you, thank you.  We can't say enough how much we appreciate you.

upcoming courses.

Somehow, it's August already, and the start of the semester is rushing towards us.  I have two courses at Berkeley this fall: a lecture course on the history of premodern science (the same course from last fall) and an undergraduate seminar.  The seminar should be interesting--last fall, I taught a seminar on Darwin and social thought, which went very well.  I thought about repeating that course, but decided instead to try something different. 

My seminar is (somewhat whimsically) titled "The Final Frontier: Science and Fiction in Twentieth Century America".  The idea is that we'll be using works of fiction as a framework for looking at social and cultural changes in twentieth-century American history.  The seminar structure is a little bit of an experiment for me--the assigned readings are almost all fiction, and the students will have research assignments to find secondary source material that puts the fiction in a historical context.  This type of seminar is supposed to help history majors develop experience with secondary source research and historiographical analysis, and I think (I hope!) this is a good way to meet those goals.  A lot of history courses use novels in their course reading, but I don't think a lot of students ever have a chance to think critically about the ways that fiction can inform historical research and analysis.  And since I really do think that science fiction has the potential to cast some light on the relationship between science and society, this is a chance for me to see how my students see those same relationships.  (I'll let y'all know when the course website is ready, so that you can critique my reading lists!) 

system failure.

There's a particular kind of sinking feeling that comes when your computer dies.  Sometimes it's a slow build, the gradual recognition that a particular noise or behavioral quirk is actually a sign that something's wrong.  In this particular case, there was no such ambiguity.  Saturday morning, bright and early, I sat down with a cup of coffee to check my email and start my weekly computer maintenance routine (backing up my documents, checking for software updates, cleaning the desktop clutter, that kind of thing).   There I was, paging through the new email, when it happened.  The cursor froze and a dense network of tiny parallel lines covered the now-flickering screen.  No warning, no early signs of trouble or strange noises or triggering events.  One minute, everything's fine, and the next minute my computer is dead.  Rebooting didn't help--the lines and the flickering persisted, and it hung on the loading screen--so I resigned myself to spending my morning (or possibly my whole day) at the Apple store.

As it turned out, I was able to get my computer looked at after only waiting in store for an hour and a half (the appointment queues for the Genius Bar are insane, but they do have a standby list), and the guy who helped me was friendly and competent.  If you're ever in the Bay Area and need to deal with the Apple support people, I strongly suggest going to the San Francisco store instead of the Emeryville one.  Even leaving out of consideration the long saga of problems I've had with Genius Bar techs at Emeryville, there's the plain fact that the San Francisco store has a place for you to sit while you wait for your appointment, while the Emeryville store doesn't.

Once I finally got seen by a tech person, the news was, well, not good, but much better than it could have been.  He ruled out a software-based origin to the problem, and he confirmed that my hard drive is healthy and my data intact.  The computer is being shipped off to a repair center, and I should have it back by the middle or end of next week.  It could have been a lot worse, and it could have been a lot more expensive.

That said, I'm still without a computer for possibly up to a week.  I'm using Matt's old laptop, so I have access to email and websites, but I don't have any of my files, and my whole workflow process has been (obviously) disrupted, so if you're expecting email or work from me this week, I may need a few extra days and some extra prompting.  On the silver-lining side, I guess this is as good a time as any to really focus on work that doesn't need the computer!  Sigh. 

academic blogging.

As promised, my reaction to the most recent Digital Campus episode  Some background: Digital Campus is a biweekly podcast from the Center for History and New Media, dealing with issues of technology and the college classroom.  If you're teaching college students, you should be listening to this podcast--it's the most consistently intelligent and useful discussion about technology and teaching that I've found so far.  (Their first episode, about Wikipedia, actually effected a fairly substantial shift in my own reaction to Wikipedia as it relates to my students.  It was also just a breath of fresh air, to listen to a discussion about Wikipedia and college teaching that -didn't- engage seriously with the "Wikipedia is the Devil" mentality that's so prevalent among academics these days.) 

Episode 10 of Digital Campus is all about blogging, and was an interesting discussion, largely because the DC participants are all blog-positive.  (Also unusual in academia these days--I wouldn't say that Ivan  "Bloggers Need Not Apply" Tribble represents the majority view, but he represents a view that's cast a shadow across the whole dialogue.)  Dan Cohen in particular has a reputation as a persuasive advocate for professorial blogging, and I generally agree with him.  Blogs can be a useful venue for discussing one's work, for sharing ideas and information, for tapping into communities, and for making connections (both personal and professional).  There's no reason at all why being a professor (or a lecturer, or adjunct instructor, or what-have-you) should mean that you have to cut yourself off from the larger internet discourse.

The specific structure for the podcast discussion was an argument against anonymity or psuedonymity in academic blogging.  (Again, a reference from Dan Cohen's blog, which gives most of the context for the podcast discussion, for those of you who haven't heard the episode.)  I agree wholeheartedly here--not just because it makes my own non-anonymous blog feel less weird!  Anonymous blogging grows largely out of fear, and it's hard to overstate the degree of fear that permeates the academic world these days, especially at the level occupied by those of us who don't have tenured (or even tenure-track) positions.  The DC group, discussing the disappearance and reappearance of the formerly-anonymous PhDinHistory blog, commented that the author, Oklahoma graduate student Sterling Fluharty, never posted anything that would have seriously compromised his chances on the job market later on.  I'm glad to hear them say that, but I admit, were I in Fluharty's position, I'd have been just as nervous about guarding my identity.  I read his blog pretty regularly, because he provides an honest and statistically-grounded picture of just how dismal the employment picture is for those of us with doctorates in history.  (Think I'm exaggerating?  Go read the blog and see what I'm talking about.)  He's openly addressing all sorts of questions that I absolutely shy away from discussing even in oblique terms; it sometimes feels as though there's a veil of silence drawn across all of the practicalities and problems of employment in the academic world.

People blog anonymously out of the belief that what they write could somehow reflect badly on them or be used against them.  Anyone who's been involved with online journalling or blogging for any length of time, though, should have internalized the first rule of anonymous/pseudonymous writing: you will be found out.  Never say anything under an obscured identity that you wouldn't be willing to take responsibility for under your own name.  The second rule of anonymous/pseudonymous writing?  People will be -trying- to find out who you are.  People can't resist a puzzle.  I'm not saying that pseudonymous or anonymous writing is wrong--I'd be a hypocrite to say that, having engaged in it myself at various points.  There are all sorts of reasons one might want to make that effort, and some of those reasons are valid.  I'm just saying that it isn't a shield.  (The corollary principle, of course, is that anyone whose identity can't be verified shouldn't be trusted.  Accountability and credibility go hand in hand.  This is why I take all of FemaleScienceProfessor's wonderful and horrifying stories with a grain of salt.  If it's all true, then it represents a kind of shocking state of affairs in the social culture of the physical sciences, but unless/until I know who she is, I'm forced to be skeptical.)

While I agree entirely with the DC crew that academics shouldn't be afraid of blogging, and that they shouldn't fall back on anonymity or pseudonymity, I stopped agreeing with them when they recommended that academic bloggers stick strictly to a declared topic or purpose.  I see what they're getting at--if you want this to be a part of your professional portfolio, you should stay on message.  Not only that, but even as blog-positive as I am, I definitely think there's a line to cross, and I've read plenty of weblogs and online journals where I can't help but wonder if the author really understands that he or she is writing in public, and that they'll inevitably be read by their parents, or students, or new friends, prospective employers, complete strangers, coworkers, -anyone-.  So I understand the advice to think before you post.

I think there are different ways to think about blogging, though.  Different ways to conceptualize the process.  I have a lot of respect for the topic focused weblogs, and I'll freely admit that they're the safest choice for academics who are concerned about repercussions of public writing.  When I think about what kind of weblog I'd like this to be, though, when I think about the ones I enjoy reading, the ones I'd like to have as models, I'm never drawn to the strictly topic-focused.  Two of the standouts, to my mind, are Timothy Burke and jo(e).   The latter is almost exclusively personal--even when she writes about teaching, it's about the personal moments.  (She's also a good example of someone who I think is doing the right thing by blogging pseudonymously--it doesn't seem to be about obscuring her own identity so much as giving a little privacy to her children.)  I don't want to bring my personal life so much into focus, but I do love how she writes.  Burke, though, does a great job of engaging in academic discourse while still giving the reader a sense of the person behind the website. 

Those of you who've been reading my online writings for any length of time know that I've gone through all the extremes of comfort and discomfort with this project.  What keeps me coming back is the sense of community, and the sense of dialogue.  I keep this site going because I persist in believing that it can be a part of a conversation.  Weblogs and journals that are narrowly topic-focused often feel to me like they're coming from a position of authority, not of conversation.  (The exception to this is the topic-focused group weblog.  Daddy Dialectic, for instance, is a group of fathers who are all using the group blog to explore issues related to parenting, and they're a great read.  Likewise Body Impolitic, Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin's weblog.)  I don't want to be an authority here.  I have other venues open to me that are better suited to speaking from authority.