Author Archive for Lauren

An open letter to the Coen Brothers

Published
by
Lauren
on May 14, 2010
in Fun and Media
. 9 Comments

Dear Joel and Ethan,

So, last week I was reading this article complaining about the state of movies today by film producer Linda Obst. She writes that the only ones that seem to get made these days are those based on comic books and video games, with lots of explosions, dumb laughs, and hot boys under the age of 24. Obst blames the recession, arguing that studios have no money, and are therefore completely unwilling to take on the risk of producing movies that are actually thoughtful or well-written if they don’t have sparkly vampires or require 3-D glasses. (Which doesn’t really make sense to me–wouldn’t movies with big stars and killer special effects require tons of money to produce? Do you have any insight on this?)

I guess I had this article somewhere in the back of my mind when I read this story about diploma mills (h/t Jessie Daniels) about a physicist who happened to see a viral pop-up ad for a bogus university, which somehow led to him falling down the rabbit hole, unearthing a vast transnational network of scam artists. It is a fascinating read full of intrigue, as Dr. George Gollin teams up with the FTC and the Secret Service in a sting operation (OPERATION GOLD SEAL!) to chase and bring down diploma mills. It involves the Liberian embassy, a clandestine meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, and Pentagon officials with fake degrees. It’s like some Cold War-era spy thriller, only about diploma mills instead of assassination and state secrets! Who knew?

You guys are smart. I bet you know where this is going. Please, please, please turn Operation Gold Seal into a movie. It seems right up your alley, a kind of madcap noir. Forget about what Obst said about what kind of movies can be produced these days. I’m sure you are just as sick of the CGI-ification of every single cartoon and toy from the ’80s as I am.

Can’t you just picture Russell Crowe as the rogue physics professor? Or perhaps you’d like to go with an older, more distinguished type like Ben Kingsley or Michael Caine. John Cho and George Clooney would make awesome Secret Service agents, and Holly Hunter and Jeff Bridges can be the couple in Spokane who cooked up the diploma mill scheme.

Okay, and just in case Obst is right, how about a compromise: throw in some of those kids from “Twilight” as undergraduate research assistants, and we’re golden.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

A fan

Archiving Tweets

Published
by
Lauren
on April 16, 2010
in Internet, To Ponder and Twitter
. 5 Comments

card catalogs
Creative Commons License photo credit: jessamyn

I’m curious what people think about the Library of Congress’s decision to digitally archive every public tweet.

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

To be honest, I don’t have a Twitter account, I don’t “follow” anyone, and I don’t really “get” the whole tweeting thing.  Obviously, I don’t know enough to have an opinion on this, but I couldn’t help but laugh at this comment made by “Uncle Fred” on a post at the Atlantic about the Twitter archive:

Great, now even future historians can muse over my failed toasted tomato sandwiches.

My questions are for those of you who are, or ever have been, on Twitter: Do you think tweets are something worth archiving? Are there privacy concerns? Will knowledge that your tweets will be archived change the nature of what you write? Any other thoughts or concerns?

Dare to use (and teach) the semicolon! ;;;

Published
by
Lauren
on March 10, 2010
in Punctuation, Writing Instruction and teaching
. 0 Comments

semi
Creative Commons License photo credit: mag3737

As a Writing Fellow, I work with students who are having trouble structuring their essays, or need help clarifying their thesis statements, but sometimes I cannot help but address grammar problems. Yesterday I had some extra time with a student, so I gave him some feedback on a recurring grammar issue I noticed when I looked over his draft essay: rampant misuse of commas and semicolons! In speaking with him, it became clear that he didn’t really know what the difference was between a comma, semicolon, or colon, or when it was appropriate to use them.

As far as commas go, I taught him the “pause” trick. Read your sentences out loud to identify where you naturally pause, and that is where the comma(s) should go. When you read, your sentences out loud, it often becomes clear, when you’ve put in unnecessary commas. [When you read [pause] your sentences out loud [pause] it often becomes clear [pause] when you’ve put in unnecessary commas.]

Unfortunately, I did not have any neat tricks up my sleeve to explain semicolon usage. In the draft that the student showed me, his semicolons should have been commas; they did not connect two independent but related clauses that could stand on their own as complete sentences. “Get rid of them,” I advised. “If you don’t know how to use them, don’t use them at all.”

This got me thinking: I can help students identify when not to use the semicolon, but how do I teach them when it is appropriate to use? I’m a sociologist, not a grammarian! I’ve never had a formal grammar lesson myself, and cannot articulate all the rules of grammar, despite implicitly knowing and using them when I write. When I told the student to err on the side of caution by not using the semicolon, I realize that I was also erring on the side of caution in my proscriptive, rather than prescriptive, advice.

I was discussing this last night with a friend I ran into on the way home from the subway. My friend, who is absolutely not a grammarian either, reminded me about her favorite podcast, Grammar Girl. “I used a semicolon for the first time in my life this year, after listening to the Grammar Girl podcast about them,” she told me. By finally learning the rules about the semicolon, she finally felt confident about using them. Now, I’ve never been afraid to use the semicolon, but I’d like to feel more confident about teaching its usage. So, off to Grammar Girl I go.

Vanilla Ice All Over Again

Published
by
Lauren
on February 17, 2010
in Acacademic Integrity, Copyright and Plagiarism
. 1 Comment

Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]

On Academic Language

Published
by
Lauren
on November 20, 2009
in Fun, Language and Resources
. 1 Comment

We often rag on our students for their poor writing abilities, but here’s a tool from the Writing Program of the University of Chicago that pokes fun at the (sometimes) incomprehensible and bloated writing of academics:

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!

You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.

But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Yours,

Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere

The Afterlife of Ephemera

Published
by
Lauren
on November 5, 2009
in Audience and Media
. 2 Comments

Last June, Hillary wrote a post on zines that led several of us here at cac.ophony to “come out” as ex-zinesters.  To continue the conversation about zines, I’d like to point out to folks the most recent issue of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.  They’ve devoted a whopping 74 pages to a comparative symposium on feminist zines, featuring both essays and full-page reprints. (Full disclosure here: some of my old zines are cited, including in Barnard Zine Librarian Jenna Freedman’s essay, in which she discusses a zine I edited when I was an angst-ridden teenager. I find this both flattering and terribly embarrassing.)

laurenOver the summer, Jenna invited me and several other people who had donated our zine collections to the Barnard Zine Library for tea (how Seven Sisters!), and we all spent a lot of time in the stacks flipping through the zines that were in circulation. This was certainly a nostalgia trip down memory lane, and a quite physical one at that, as we were literally looking at and holding the very photocopied and stapled pieces of paper that we may have once kept stashed in boxes and bins under our beds and in our closets. Seeing zines in their original form now archived in a college library is quite a different experience from seeing them discussed or reprinted in a fancy academic journal, however. The attention is nice, but one’s interaction with the zines feels at least one step removed. Even if you read the print version of SIGNS rather than online, the reprinted zine excerpts don’t look or feel like the original. (And, in this case, reading this issue of SIGNS online instead of print allows you to see the zine reprints in color).

I am fascinated by the “afterlife” of those objects that were once considered to be—or were created to be—ephemeral. They live on in discussions by critics and historians, and in historical archives, libraries, and museums. These days, they are also being revived digitally, including on Google Books. You know, in the pre-blogging era, when we were sixteen and pouring our angsty hearts out on paper, did any of us have any idea that the words and images we created would still be in circulation? If we did, would that have changed what we produced, how we presented ourselves, or who we considered our audience to be? I wonder.

“They just won’t do the reading!”

Published
by
Lauren
on October 2, 2009
in Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy and Writing Across the Curriculum
. 2 Comments

I recently tried to do a writing exercise with two groups of students that wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped, largely because I naively expected the students to have done the reading that their professor had assigned, and had based the exercise largely on this false assumption. “Whoa, I am really out of practice,” I thought to myself. “How could I forget that you can’t rely on students to do their homework?” Although these weren’t my own classes, I viscerally flashed back on the frustration I often experienced as an adjunct, when my own students came to class not having done the reading. I hear this all the time from instructors: “They just won’t do the reading!”

Although part of the problem of students not reading may be attributed to their busy schedules, poor time management, or mere laziness, when I try to put myself in my students’ shoes, and think about the times when I have slacked off on doing all of my reading, what it often came down to was that I did not do the reading when it seemed like it was a waste of time. I remember being frustrated when lectures seemed to merely repeat what the texts said, as well as when the readings seemed irrelevant to class discussions, exams, and assignments.

As an instructor, my gut instinct is to say, “But, but, it’s good for you! Trust me!” Or to explain the pedagogical relevance of all the readings on the syllabi. I’m not sure if that is the best strategy, though. I wonder: how can we better convey to our students that there is a reason why doing their assigned reading is important? I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer lies in the creative writing mantra “Show, don’t tell.” That is, rather than painstakingly explaining to your students why it is important for them to do their homework, teach in such a way that your students see for themselves that the texts you have assigned them to read have value.

In my duties as a Writing Fellow, I’d like to make a push for instructors to use writing as a means of “showing” the benefits of reading. According to WAC philosophy, there are numerous reasons why we advocate for students to be writing more frequently in all of their classes. Here’s just one: by writing about what they are reading, students will feel more invested in the texts their professors have assigned, and professors will have written proof that the time they spend putting together a syllabus is not a waste of their time.

A Paean to Print Media

Published
by
Lauren
on September 9, 2009
in Media, Technology and To Ponder
. 2 Comments

Paper Massacre
Creative Commons License photo credit: Vanessa Roanhorse

I recently moved from a brownstone to a large multi-story apartment building. One of the casualties of this move was my apparently unrealistic expectation that when you get a newspaper delivered to you daily, you will always have a blue-plastic wrapped paper lovingly waiting for you when you wake up in the morning and put some pants and flip-flops on to retrieve it. After three days in a row of having my paper poached by some unscrupulous new neighbor, I did what any self-respecting thirty-something graduate student would do: I griped about it on Facebook. (Well, after calling the paper for re-delivery, that is).

While many people have expressed sympathy about the paper-poaching, some people I’ve complained to, both virtually and face-to-face, have also expressed surprise that I get the newspaper delivered to me daily. The expense of daily delivery is one aspect of the surprise (to which my reply is: bourgie habits die hard), but some are also amazed that I actually read the paper in print form. “Why don’t you just read it online?” they ask.

So, I’ve been trying to articulate why I prefer to read my paper in 3-D rather than online. Here are just three reasons:

  • It’s part of my morning ritual. Every morning, 7 days a week, I like to sit at my kitchen table and read the paper while I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. If I read it online, I’d have to bring my laptop to the kitchen, or bring my breakfast to my desk, which is a personal boundary I shall not cross. (And don’t even think about suggesting I scroll through the headlines on my iPod in between sips of coffee and bites of granola).
  • The sensory experience. Feeling newsprint between your fingers, smelling traces of ink, hearing the scratch of paper as you turn pages: you lose the tactile experience when you read online.  Perhaps it is my history as a former zinester that led me to appreciate the allure of physical paper. Analog rules.
  • The reading experience. I read differently when the copy is printed on a page in my hands as opposed to appearing on a screen in front of me. I like being able to visually scan a large page, or easily flip to another page, rather than having to (primarily) scroll vertically and click on links. The content and quantity of my reading also changes depending on format. The printed paper is curated differently from the online version, leading to a different cumulative narrative of headlines and stories. When I read a physical paper, I tend to look at every page, scanning all headlines and reading what appeals to me. When I read the paper online, my eye gravitates to what is on top and in the middle and in large print, rarely scrolling down to read or click on the smaller headlines. My attention span wanders. I veer off to read other sites. I end up reading less, and being less informed.

I know, I know, despite my preference for print, the newspaper industry is dying. But what do other people think about print versus online? Do you read print newspapers, or are you primarily an online reader? What are your reasons either way?

E-mail Etiquette

Published
by
Lauren
on May 4, 2009
in E-mail
. 0 Comments

E-mails from your students driving you crazy? The latest “Ms. Mentor” column in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers e-mail etiquette for faculty to teach their students. Read it, pass it on, enforce in your syllabi, and then check out this hilarious thread on the Chronicle forums of “favorite” student e-mails. If that one’s too overwhelming for you (it’s got 546 pages, and counting!), this is also a gem: please answer!!!!!!!!.

The New York Times asks, “Is voice mail obsolete?”

Published
by
Lauren
on April 2, 2009
in Technology
. 7 Comments

An article appeared in the April 1st edition of the New York Times about the (possibly?) inevitable disappearance of voice mail, as people, especially younger folks, turn to and prefer text-messaging and email.

What’s wrong with voice mail? Well, according to the article, IT TAKES TOO LONG TO CHECK.

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Or how about, IT’S REALLY CONFUSING. AND TIRING.

“If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code,” Ms. Cheong said. “Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again,” she added, feigning exhaustion.

Hmm… I don’t know. Is this just another silly trend piece about the short-attention span of the youth of today and their addiction to cutting-edge technology? Or do you think voice mail will go the way of the VCR, into the dustbins of techno-history?