Turning A Corner

This being a square birthday,* the last I’ll have before I have to worry about who will need me, who will feed me, I’ll take advantage of the occasion to write something solemn and portentous.

The years have steadily amplified my appreciation of, and amazement at, the intricacy and fragility of the world. Even in very modest circumstances, we’re surrounded by devices of staggering complexity; even with minimal social engagement, we’re immersed in lives whose cumulative joys and stresses extend far beyond our capacity to imagine. And I live in neither very modest circumstances nor minimal social engagement — I’m swamped in complexities and intensities.

Our capacity to start with [natural] complexities and amplify them hyperbolically charms me. In the face of our mortality, of our relative insignificance, of our childlike overconfidence in our capacity to make a difference, our determination to take ourselves seriously wins my heart. When Nietzsche compares humanity to a mayfly (at the beginning of my beloved “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense”), he calls our attention to “how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.” The comparison has just the opposite impact on me: no matter how heavily the forces of circumstance weigh against our sense of our dignity, we remain convinced — by the testimony of our actions, our daily lives — that somehow all this stuff matters greatly.

I take that confidence as a theological clue to both our harmful obliviousness to how small and limited we really are and to how nonetheless we are beloved, we are given meaning. That gift of meaning attains its fullness as our lives cooperate in enhancing the beautiful, frail, evanescent intricacies of life, so that others may share in apprehending them. They are, and remain, always a gift. It’s easy to damage, destroy, mangle such gifts — but when we take the harder way of letting the gift teach us how to receive it, and then cooperating with the gift toward engendering more beauty, more grace, we testify to a grandeur extends beyond our grasp.

Among those gifts in my life, I number my remarkably spectacular family; my patient, devoted friends; my students and colleagues over a long-ish teaching ministry; congregations that have made homes for me in their midst; and the extended network of people who have drawn what I write here into their lives, who have reciprocally made me a welcome part of theirs. Thank you for this, and all the many gifts you’ve given me.


* I thought “square birthday” was a term I’d heard from someone else, a birthday that’s an integer squared, and it made sense to me and so I started writing this entry on the assumption that the term was publicly intelligible. A quick search, however, turned up no obvious links that used the term as I do here, so in case my [false] memory is an inspiration just masquerading as a memory, I’ll stake a claim for it here.

This Is Not What They Mean By “Convergence”

So, by apparent coincidence, Chris sent me an email the other day calling my attention to “Armor of God Pajamas,” just a couple of days after Mother Jeanette DeFriest preached about those very pjs at St. Luke’ on Sunday. That reminded me that someone had asked that I put up a pointer to the recording of my sermon from the week before, so here that is. That, in turn, reminded me that my voice also recently appeared online in a very different setting. That, in a turn that brings us almost full circle, reminds me that while Nick Janus and I were conversing about life, the universe, and everything this afternoon in Azeroth, we fell into a discussion of Mother DeFriest, and what kind of character she might play if she took an interest in Warcraft.

Web 2.0?

There and Back Again

When I met Jill O’Neill yesterday, her first question was, “How is the dog?” I ought therefore to assure readers that Beatrice came through her toxic dose of chocolate as sweet and dumb as ever.

All the travel yesterday went as well as could be asked, if it be granted that it involved waking up at 3:45 in the morning. No traffic, no cancellations, no delays, and no one even squeezing into the seat next to me on either flight (though on the return flight I was seated behind a knee-masher; he reclined till the crossbar of the tray table crushed my patella, then — as I tried to maintain some degree of leg space — bounced his seat back to make sure that he gained every millimeter of reclining space possible, which was important because he was in the exit row seat without a seat in front of him). I got home early, to Pippa’s surprise. She had a great time with Beth, and came home cheery and agreeable.

What I said at the SSP-TMR turned out to depart more or less significantly from what I expected. Jill had been in touch with me several times, which was very helpful, but arriving on the scene and sizing up the people there, and hearing the kinds of thing they came to Philadelphia to talk about, I realized that I had not arrived at as focused a sense of the occasion as would be most productive. I scribbled through the morning session, excused myself early from lunch, and came up with a different set of points.

What I wanted to propose — whether it came through or not, I suspect I could have made my points more clearly — was the relatively bleak situation for discovery tools in the humanities, compared to the snazzy, elegant tools in the scientific, technical, medical sector. Once I caught on to the difference, it made sense; STM searching involves data sets that lend themselves to orderly definitions and manipulation, and there’s a lot more commercial-industrial value in the databases in STM fields. So as I say, it makes sense that discovery tools have a big head start on tools in the humanities. At the same time, “scholarly publishing” does indeed include the humanities, and there’s a sense in which the digital transition in the humanities poses a more pointed challenge to the inherited models and assumptions about scholarly publishing. With that in view, I described a series of desiderata. For the vast audience of non-expert users, search tools need to be much more intuitive and effective; the user community with which I’m most familiar engages two discovery methods, a bibliographic interface that baffles even committed researchers (I won’t name proprietary names), and Google. Each of these, for different reasons, returns less-than-satisfactory results. The humanities in general, and the theological academy in particular, stand very far behind STM sector for the useability of discovery tools.

(It occurs to me that another piece of this puzzle may involve the various levels of users, and their capacity to interact productively with databases. Even a lower-level inquirer into STM research quite probably brings more rich acquaintance with structured inquiry than many advanced scholars in the humanities. This may engender a cycle of success-and-improvement that leaves humanities search lagging.)

So, useability constitutes a goal for non-expert users, but for more adept users “useability” (in a different sense) would be great, too — but the advanced useability, involving full, standards-compliant mark-up, rich metadata, and so on.

On behalf of all humanities users, though, I urged the SSP to look forward to a digital-media future, rather than backward, toward a book-and-card-catalog past. Open access (made possible via online distribution, made practicable by the capacity for unlimited exact copies), non-verbal media (increasing amounts of scholarly communications will involve audio files and images, not solely alphanumeric information), and developing business models that support these endeavors with a basis that doesn’t rely on restriction and control (the ol’ copyright model).

I’ll try to add more reflections on the earlier sessions, but I have an all-day faculty meeting today. . . .

What I’ll Say

I’m working on what I expect to say tomorrow at the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s conference. I had a short conversation with the panel convener, and she had some fairly specific angles in mind for me to cover. I likewise had a chance to benefit fro Dorothea’s expertise — if I don’t look like a rube when another panelist refers to “gold” or “green” solutions, it’ll be because Dorothea tipped me off.

The moderator would like me to speak about my role “in the creation, dissemination and use of content,” and “the scope of the content with which I work (discipline(s), content formats (datasets, images, manuscripts, books, journals, etc.).” Answers to those two questions themselves could fill much of the fifteen minutes I’ve been allotted. I write books, articles, sermons, classroom lectures, informal [blog] essays, and utterly casual online observations, and I badger colleagues into preparing and offering essays and teaching materials, published both online and in print. The motivations vary for all of these, but at their heart they all involve my active participation in the conversations directed toward truth. I get paid for relatively few authorial gestures, and get paid relatively little for those. The richest reward for my authorial and editorial activity comes from appreciative readers who take my writing seriously enough to take it up critically, respond in kind, and provoke me to seek truth more vigorously, or more soundly, or more precisely. Some of that happens when congregations talk with me about the sermon I just preached; some of that happens when colleagues and students talk with me about the books and articles I’ve written; some of that happens when other bloggers, or commenters, or readers who leave no trace of their online activity push back, applaud, link, or otherwise incorporate my writing into their discursive activity.

As such, I contribute to print books and journals, I write online, I produce graphical elements for communicating my ideas (online and in print), and I perform my writing in live oratory; my creative work can be bought at bookstores, downloaded in mp3, html, pdf, and jpeg formats.

“What,” (asks my moderator, “are the absolute basic requirements for electronic information for the user community that you serve?” That’s tricky, since I address such varied user communities. Ease-of-access constitutes a basic requirement for some of them; standards-compliant mark-up constitutes a basic requirement for others.

“How does the projected use of content drive your presentation/delivery of that content to the user?” I don’t have the leisure to modulate these in a fine-grained way. Most of what I do — what I say in class, what I write for publication, what I post online, what I preach, I shape with a view to the primary audience, nuanced by by awareness of the various secondary audiecnes of which I’m aware. But I don’t produce many different versions of the projects I produce (at most, I offer both html/xml/jpeg and pdf versions of online publications). I try to hew close to standards-compliance, so that my materials will be most useable on the most various devices, but I don’t have time to adhere fastidiously to every element of open-access XML-pure conventions.

In my world — computing among humanities professionals and students — granularity would contribute to ease of use, but the cost of the transition from familiar publishing models to markup-savvy electronic publication inhibits our encountering a rich, orderly information environment. Among my colleagues and students, very few are prepared to learn a new vocabulary and syntax for querying databases. They prefer to endure frustration at the hands of a few proprietary megadatabases, or to rely simply on Google, to wrapping their brains around an unfamiliar way of parsing, tagging, and retrieving information. Great as the benefits would be, they lie beyond the line-of-sight of most of the academics among whom I move. An increasing number of academics have dipped their toes into the strange new world of information at the level of blogs, perhaps even of podcasts — but we’re still a tiny minority, and even the toe-dippers tend to look glassy-eyed if you take them to the rarefied topics of wikis, standards, or audio- or video editing, publishing, and retrieval.

I expect that “the plethora of interfaces, extensions and widgets on the Web [will affect] information, educational and research environments” in theology and the humanities, but we will probably dawdle behind other academic areas. The romance of book-based research has a tremendous grip on the imagination of my guild.

The greatest need I anticipate involves enhancing user-orientation of database tools. Someone just questioned me about bibliographic tools, and I found myself probing the specific fields in which the researcher worked, her comfort level with database editing, the output formats she expected to be need — and this was a scholar whom I knew to be capable of constructing well-formed queries.

I’ll probably digress to cover other topics as well, but those are the top ones that occur to me right offhand.

Till We Meet Again

I had to say goodbye to Margaret this morning, and won’t be catching up with her for another five weeks — so in her honor, I’m posting this picture.

09-03-06_1902.jpg

We were headed to our neighborhood gelato establishment (of which Margaret and Pippa have become enamored), and the minute Margaret saw this sign, she asked “Why do you have a twelve-hour parking restriction in a lot that where you only enforce the restriction for nine hours?” I had passed the sign any number of times, but never did the math.

Anarchy and Scrabble

When I addressed the Anarchy and Christianity conference about our approach to education, I emphasized the extent to which our children fulfilled our hope that if we didn’t force them to learn things on our timetable, they would pick them up on their own schedule. That’s a hard principle to live by when your children haven’t shown any interest something you think important, but we bit our lips and did our best, and in time each of the children has turned out restlessly to hunger for learning when the time was right.

Yesterday, Pippa asked to play Scrabble. She enjoyed it enough to play again today, and we’re on our way downtown to pick up a complete set (the one from our basement has the wrong number of letter tiles, and some have alternate letters penciled in to help make up the difference — pretty distracting, especially if you’re a beginning player). I can’t enumerate all the ways this delights us. We delight in the implications for her spelling, her vocabulary, her calculating, just for starters; but it also evokes memories of epic Scrabble matches between my mother and me. Chalk up another one for patience in pedagogy!


[Later: Tuesday morning, she’s been sitting at the dining room table reading the dictionary we used as a reference for acceptable words. . . . ]

Whew?

In the midst of the brouhaha over it the gender-exclusive politics over at the Office 2.0 conference, it occurred to me that I will be speaking at a conference this coming week, too. I hadn’t given the matter much thought before, since I was contacted by a woman from the organizing committee and half the participants in my session are women — but seized by a spasm of accountability, I went to look over the rest of the program, and lo and behold, of the remaining 14 named speakers, only two are women. Now, 4 out of 18 is a still a better percentage than the 1 out of 53 that Jeneane was reporting, but still — I’d have liked to think that “scholarly publishing” was further along this particular road.

Early Church Chronology

I’m working on the Chronology cards for my Early Church History class; I probably need about 56 or 64 (the Avery 5390 cards we’re using come in an 8-up format). Right now I have the following dates:

Fall of Jerusalem 70
†Clement of Rome 100
†Ignatius 107
Pliny-Trajan correspondence 111
Bar Kochba Revolt 135
†Polycarp 155
Montanus begins preaching New Prophecy 156
Justin’s Martyrdom 165
† Irenaeus 200
Septimius Severus’ Persecution 209-211
†Clement of Alex 215
†Tertullian 220
†Hippolytus 235
Decian Persecution 249-251
†Origen 253
† Cyprian 258
Diocletian’s Persecution 303-312
Edict of Milan 311
Council of Arles rules against Donatists, 314
Council of Nicaea 325
† Arius 336
† Anthony 356
Apollinaris elected Bp of Laodicea 361
†Athanasius 373
†Basil 379
†Macrina 380
Council of Constantinople 381
†Gregory of Nazianzus 389
†Gregory of Nyssa 395
†Ambrose 397
†John Chrysostom 407
Fall of Rome 410
†Jerome 420
Nestorius begins preaching against the Theotokos 428
†Augustine 430
Council of Ephesus 431
†Cyril of Alexandria 444
Tome of Leo, 450-ish?
Council of Chalcedon 451
†Benedict of Nursia 543
Gregory sends Augustine to England 597

so I have room for a few more. We don’t have a plausible date for Egeria’s pilgrimage; what else shall I include? (The course now ends in 600, without consideration of the church in the British Isles.)

Definition of “Fantasy”

Somehow my fantasy baseball team has fallen into contention this summer. It started out as haplessly as ever; I might as well have named my team “It proves that theory bears no relation to practice, because AKMA used to study baseball till his brains leaked out his ears, and his fantasy league team is still in last place.” But about two months into the season, my team started playing less badly, and then less badly still, and the past few days it has been playing so very non-badly that they’re in first place.

I’m at a loss to explain this phenomenon, especially since I’ve paid less attention to my tea this summer than any other time I’ve played. Still, as Labor Day approaches, my fantasy league team is clinging to first place, and I’m afraid to pay any more attention to it lest I disrupt whatever it is that’s been converging on my team’s behalf. . . .