It's Time

I have moved on to Word Press and want to focus on my goal of explaining Information Science to the public.

My major paper in graduate school (not really a thesis - I was not required to write one - but nevertheless submitted for peer review at The American Archivist) argued for this social science to be informed by the natural sciences and by information science. I actually corrected a prominent archivist and past president of the Society of American Archivists on facts of evolution and quantum physics as they touched the archives profession!

This is going to take a lot of developing, and so I shall attempt to do so at my new blog, Archive of Babel. I shall also blog about atheism, of course, and hopefully complete A Galapagos Diary and my posts on The Extended Phenotype.

You are welcome there.

Technical Fiction: A Proposal

It's up at the Triumvirate.

It was a dark and stormy night...

I just vacated my temporary internship position at the Smithsonian...

I just received the first round of comments and corrections paper that I submitted for peer review...

Holy crap, does this situation sound somewhat familiar?

The irony! The irony! I could make such a Sternberg joke right now! ;-) But peer review is not for whiners.

(Actually, the bulk of my paper survived and I found the criticism to be well founded. After going to SAA this year, I actually disagree with parts of my own paper now.)

Ah, back to the drawing board. That's the name of the game. Plus, I'm working on other articles and projects - while sitting in the hot tub. A strong stomach for rejection - I has it!

(I'd better have it...)

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

I'm going to try an experiment.

The Triumvirate has been in mothballs because of me being just too gosh darn busy - and now, as an assignment I must write a paper that is of sufficient quality to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Naturally, I'm a little stressed out. Also, being that my undergraduate degree was in English, I'm still an English nerd enough to be concerned about the lack of literary drafts and ephemera accessible to scholars who are studying contemporary writers - drafts and notes and diary pages that we have from previous great writers - because of the rise of the personal computer and the internet.

Therefore, I'm going to attempt to solve all three of these concerns at once by blogging the iterative process of writing my paper.

I'm going to journal my process in blog posts at the Triumvirate, along with my questions, false starts, revisions, and frustrations, and attach successive drafts of the paper. However I will not make these drafts visible to anyone but me for the time being. Only after my paper is written, submitted, and judged/graded, will I make the drafts public. This is due to the fact that I don't, at this time, want comments or help. Please, I need to do this alone!

Another reason is that this is really an attempt to archive drafts, and as such, each individual blog post will not really make sense out of context, but only as a part of the whole. Because the whole will be more than the sum of its parts, I considered making the posts private as well, to be unveiled when the drafts are made accessible, but ultimately I decided against that. This is part journal, part archive - and it's also an experiment in a new area of archival theory, the idea that the archivist in our digital age is involved in record-creation, not just in record-keeping, and must manage not only the end of the record's life-cycle, but its beginning.

With personal computers and the internet I hope to recapture what we have largely lost of what the writer creates while working, and hopefully to provide something valuable about the scholarly communication process as well.

Maybe if I get my act together (I want to write another paper for publication, as well as enter as student paper contest through IMLS), I can finish blogging The Extended Phenotype and my Galapagos Diary.

The first post.
The second post.
The third post.

Reviews and Research by Yours Truly

I had no idea these were still online, in violation of Tasini v. United States (that's okay!). Damn lawyers!

You need to sign in to look at them. Most of my stuff is not online. (Damn lawyers!)

My review of While I Was Gone by Sue Miller.
Review of Cassanova In Love by Andrew Miller (no relation).

The best book I ever reviewed was the exquisite The Underpainter by Ann Urquhart. Reviewing The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine was perhaps what piqued my interest in the Galapagos, aside from The Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin himself.

Prospect Park, An Historical Survey, done for Hess, Roise and Company back when I was in historic preservation. I also assisted on a a survey of historic properties in the Lake Minnetonka area, and gathered archaeological data on the excavation of the Mill Ruins (neither of them posted online), years before I was to volunteer there.

Everyone should Google him or herself every once in a while.

Why Do You Blog?

Rev. BigDumbChimp gave me this meme tag: Why do you blog?

Um...

...that reminds me of a story. One that I wrote. An excerpt from my first novel, really - based upon real events. I'll call it Why Do You Write?

I'll take the reason that my protagonist, Geoff, gives for my own. (Yeah, I write a lot from the point of view of men - or try to. I'm so feminine. *sigh*)

I've Won an Award

And I'm honored. I really mean it. It means a real lot to me!

I scratched my head, I admit, at the name "Whore Church" but Kevin explains it as: "Next time someone seems offended about the term 'Whore Church' remind them of its origin–it’s how God refers to the apostate church. It is exactly what I mean by the term: There is a false church which is in reality the 'Whore of Babylon.'"

I have a knee-jerk reaction to that phrase because it seems to be applied especially to women who shimmy outside of the harem but I know Kevin hates abusive churches and that's not what it means here. (And I always felt admiration for Babylon, its hanging gardens, its number system, its myths which were taken by the ancient Hebrews, by the way.)

It’s certainly nice to win something. Especially when you’ve been cranking out fiction only to never be contacted again by editors who also decide to fold their fiction contest or the fiction section of their enterprise! (Man, those people who say “without evolution atheists have no creation myth” are so full of it, because I’ve had my own creation myth screwed with and rejected so many times that I’ve developed a hard scab!) ;-)

So I’ll just parade my award for a while if you don’t mind.