Subject/Object » Writing

On the Virtues of Preexisting Material: A Manifesto, By Rick Prelinger

Steven Chabot — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:19:12 +0000

Picked up from if:book, a nice manifesto which echos a lot of what I have been thinking about concerning this tension between the new and the old, both new knowledge and new mediums to spread that knowledge.

Why add to the population of orphaned works?
Don’t presume that new work improves on old
Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
Dregs are the sweetest drink
And leftovers were spared for a reason
Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
We approach the future by typically roundabout means
We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
Archives are justified by use
Make a quilt not an advertisement

I recommend you read the article, each of these points are explained in greater depth.

Looking at the issues: Thinking and writing about the library

Steven Chabot — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 20:08:43 +0000

One of the first books I purchased for myself, with my own money and in a drive by myself to the chain bookstore in my suburban town, was a copy of e e cummings’s work No Thanks. At the beginning he lists, with no thanks, the 14 publishers who rejected the work before it was finally published.

After being rejected for another job after an interview that both I and the panel agreed was excellent, I feel like when I finally do get a job I will want to say “No Thanks” to those colleges and universities who rejected me for now 43 positions.

Yes, 43. 43 applications, 6 interviews, one stupidly rejected offer. From tenure-track positions at top schools to part time library tech jobs anywhere, I have applied to everything. My catch-22: libraries in urban centres say I need more experience, while those in more remote areas will not even call me for an interview.

I know I didn’t get reference experience during my library degree. That was my first stupid mistake, saying I would be faithful to my old office job by working weekends, thereby messing my schedule for hours I was offered on the reference desk.

So, since no one will give me a job I have to find some kind of way of staying engaged. I have worked on my resume and cover letter until my eyes have watered. The multiple librarians who have reviewed it have said it was excellent, including the chair of the last hiring committee I spoke with.

I want to at least be engaged with ideas and write about things so I can keep my name out there. I feel that without the support of a position and a title people will soon forget about me. And then new graduates will come out of library school and I will have to explain what I have been doing these 6 or 8 months when I compete against them.

My second catch-22: I want to write in order to stay focused on getting a position, but I feel like I cannot write without some professional experience. I am sick of living my life in books, articles, and theories. I want to see what the real issues are. I want to know exactly where my energy needs to be directed. Before I embark on writing and thinking about things I want to identify where the real issues are.

But how do I do that without a job? Catch-22……

Reviewing my thoughts, my writing, my career, and blogging

Steven Chabot — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:44:54 +0000

Just for starters, I wanted to say that I have not been writing seriously, either for myself or for others, for almost the entire summer. Even writing this post is difficult, which is why I am starting with this disclaimer to get my mental juices flowing.

A confession: I have had the worst summer in recent memory. It goes back to having a very poor final semester. I hope to write more specifically about my school experience later. I will say that that last semester killed almost all of the excitement I had entering school. Even at the end of the winter semester I felt like I had so much passion and dedication, and my experience basically killed it.

Except for the possibility of employment. I made it through that final semester with the hope that my first position would make it better. I gambled all of my hopes on the fact that if I could only suffer through useless assignments, “lectures” dominated by group presentations, a disappointing practicum, and an administration which could be distant from the reality of students, I would be able to secure a fulfilling position which would allow me to keep learning, to keep doing research and investigation, and really help people with their work and research.

I didn’t expect to have a position right out of school. First thing, my school had no successful work study or co-op, but only a practicum which was about 100 hours of work, so I didn’t expect to be set up with a position. And, I want to be an academic librarian, which means there is less flexibility in hiring.

Now, six months after finishing my last essay, I am having a really difficult time staying motivated, keeping my passion. I remember how I used to just pull books off the shelve–on librarianship, on the history of libraries, on the future of information. All summer I have not really been able to read substantially on a topic.

Admittedly, I had a single job offer. However, I did not have a positive feeling from my communications with the people there, and it was far away, and it would have thrown my household and family into shambles. Nevertheless, I have submitted more than 30 applications and have had only four interviews.

My…depression I guess you could call it, although it is more like a slump… my slump has only deepened as time goes on because I don’t really understand what more I can do. I was in the top 20 percent of my graduating class. I have had my resume reviewed with excellent feedback. I have followed up with selection panels who only have good things to say about my interviews.

And now I have lost my student job at the library, so I am unemployed. So, that has been the general downturn of my entire summer. I have not been writing, or reading, or connecting with other librarians. I expected to be well on my way to preparing a paper for publication, participating with colleagues on projects, and working on some kind of presentation to a conference or professional meeting. How can I do all that when I am now worrying about paying my rent?

I will say one positive thing: I have been invited to participate as a junior professional and a blogger in the Canadian Library Association’s National Summit on Library Human Resources (blog, press release). The meeting over two days next week between senior professionals from every area in librarians as well as executive members of the CLA will address the future of human resources in Canadian libraries. I was nominated for a fully funded trip to Ottawa, which is a great privilege and I am very excited. Please, if you are interested, read the proceedings from me and the other bloggers involved.

Lastly, I have thought seriously about closing this blog. I’ve noticed that the library blog sphere has died lately. Or, at least, I have not read anything in my reader which I feel like I need to comment on. Maybe it is me. Or maybe not. Maybe there is really nothing much said anymore.

However, I think I will keep writing. If only for myself, to get back into having my own thoughts. It has taken me all summer to detox from the horrible experience which was the last semester of school.

Book Reviews and Librarianship

Steven Chabot — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:59:16 +0000

I had my first little Library Journal book review published last month, a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s final collection of essay and stories Armageddon in Retrospect. No one at the magazine indicated to me what self-archiving rights I had, so I don’t know if I can reproduce it, but the link to it is here.

Yesterday as well I spent the day reading a soon to be published book of philosophy, and wrote my little review in the late night. This morning I got an acknowledgment from my editor, and I had a chance to re-read what I had written.

It made me think how connected to this older kind of librarianship the act of writing book reviews continues to be. I admit that it is also connected to that aristocratic ideal that librarians would be the judge of good books, but I think I really enjoy looking over a book, considering why it would be good or useful, and giving my little judgment of its contents in order that other people can inform their decision.

I have always felt that I was more of a reader than a writer, or that I enjoyed the process of reading over the process of writing. But I do find it easy to write about books, regardless of how connected I am to the Internet or whatever is supposed to replace books.

To Print or Not to Print: Giving up reading PDFs on the computer

Steven Chabot — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:13:08 +0000

This semester I gave myself a challenge: I was going to do all of my reading for this research project I am doing on my computer. No printing whatsoever. I was going to take notes right on the computer, and I even got a great piece of Mac software called Skim which has wonderful markup functions (I recommend it despite my failure at using it).

However, I can’t do it anymore. I feel lost. I have all of these readings which I can’t keep track of. I read half way though one reading, find an interesting reference, and because I am already on the computer I do a quick Google Scholar search for the paper, leaving me all turned around from where I was. I am trying to take notes, but it just isn’t as convenient to me as having the articles right there to consult.

Plus, I have to start writing tomorrow, and I am already anxious about the prospects. Flipping back and forth between the reader and my LaTeX processor seems like a nightmare. If you don’t know how I work (maybe I’ll take a picture next time), let’s say it looks like an printing press exploded. I like to make piles of materials on the floor, with each pile standing for a different part of my argument, so I know exactly where to turn to. When I am done with a paper I place it in a final pile so it doesn’t get in the way again: this way I know I have cited everything I wanted to.

The thing is, I am a digital native. I have this blog, a Flickr account and I use Facebook. I have been chatting and writing online since I was 13 or so. However, I think that the process of reading and writing for the university is so tied up with the medium of print that, for me at least, I have to work in a print world to be continually successful at it.

So, I figure I can just suck it up, buy an extra stack of paper, and print them when I get home. Actually, the prospect is exciting me. Perhaps I can reward myself with a filing cabinet, now that I am writing things that actually interest me and that I will want to keep.

Winter Updates #2: Publishing a Research Project

Steven Chabot — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:57:32 +0000

Quick on the heels of my book reviews I am working on, this semester I decided to take on a practicum class, which is like a mini non-required Co-Op, because our program does not have a Co-Op program (yet, more on that in a further winter update).

After absolutely falling in love with Information Literacy after taking the class last semester, I approached a librarian at another campus who teaches a credit course in IL (which is a big deal for the conservative University of Toronto).

Opposed to working there directly, she proposed a research project based on the assessment of her students in the course. Working with the TA of the course, the three of us are publishing a paper examining the old tests and assignments, trying to understand why, after a semester of study, students continually fail to understand Boolean searching, and constructing search statements.

I am completing the literature review and a part of the content analysis coding. Of all my work this semester, this may be my most time consuming, contributing to the probably the three busiest months in my life.

However, it will also most likely be the greatest learning opportunity I will have had in these last two years. I feel really confident when I say to prospective libraries that I have detailed empirical knowledge with the IL needs of todays undergraduates. Plus, to be academically published, can’t complain about that.

Winter Updates #1: Writing Book Reviews

Steven Chabot — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 01:58:37 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve had something substantial to say. This goes along with me not really being interested in reading blogs and keeping up with the debates there–both in the library blog sphere and in with my feeds in general. This is not the first time I have gone through these periods of decline, and I know I am not the only one who has blanked on their blog writing.

However, there have been a lot of positive developments in my career over the last few months, and I hope to deal with them in the next few posts.

First of all, I have submitted myself to some book review editors, and I currently have two books I am reading for two different journals. The first is an academic examination of blogs and the blog sphere for The Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship. The second is a collection of unpublished writings by Kurt Vonnegut for Library Journal. The second is only the standard 200 word review, but the first is a substantial one thousand words.

I really should have tried to finish the longer one over Christmas, because now it is getting in the way of school work, but I have decided to work a few hours less this semester to fit in writing, school work and applying for jobs.

It is great to finally have a change to publish my writing. And, hopefully, I will have a peer-reviewed paper to add to them, which I will talk about in my next post.

On good prose writing

Steven Chabot — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:28:02 +0000

I enjoy non-fiction prose. Nine times out of ten I would rather read a good book of non-fiction over a novel, particularly if the book is well written. Usually this runs under the subject heading “Philosophy”, but in its broadest definition this includes everything from every discipline. And not everything has to be academic; I love the essay as a literary form, and I wish there was a good magazine in my city of essays in the the style of E.B. White or Emerson or Montaigne or Walter Benjamin or Jorge Luis Borges or any other number of serious yet non-academic, non-journalist, writers.

Furthermore, I think I am good at it. My problem with my writing is a lack of serious energy and motivation, not a lack of skill. I don’t consider myself a writer at this point because I cannot sacrifice sleep for my craft as great writers tend to do. However, I enjoy writing in school, even if it is something I am not particularly interesting in learning. I like writing non-fiction because of one particular high school teacher, Mr. Garbas.

I didn’t have him until Grade 12 history, so until then all I had really learned is the 5-paragraph essay: introduction which mentions your three points, three paragraphs, and a conclusion with a reiteration of your three points. He got up the very first day and drew three links of a chain on the board. I loved him because he was overly-grouchy, to the point where you knew it was all for show (he couldn’t get away with it nowadays). He would insult us, then go on to say that everything you write, from a letter to your dissertation, should have a point, preferably an argument. Each link in the chain, be it a paragraph or a sentence, should work towards proving your point. Anything that doesn’t prove your point should be cut, or at the very least footnoted. Furthermore, every link in the chain should naturally be introduced by the previous link and naturally lead into the following link. These were the holy duality of Coherence and Unity.

I love non-fiction when it it exhibits Coherence and Unity. A paper should not force you anywhere, it should lead you from the beginning to the end without trouble, and you shouldn’t have to re-read in confusion. By all means re-read in awe or read again because you disagree, but it shouldn’t be hard, even the most erudite writing. Each piece should link to the next, and they all should link to the whole. And, if we are reading an essay as classically understood, by all means take us around in circles. I love Susan Sontag for the way in which she dances around an issue, dropping breadcrumbs for you as you go, as you slowly see the picture she is painting one stroke at a time.

Which is why I dislike the fact that I have a group project with an individual assignment that consists of making something “alternative”: a blog, or a wiki, or a video or something else which would require a 2.0 ending. I just can’t think of what to do for this thing, beyond taking my work done for the group project and posting it online somewhere. The project is about Mass Media and Alternative Media, and I wrote two pages about the theoretical critiques of mass media (McChesney, Chomsky etc.). I just don’t know how to translate that into something “creative.”

Feed Reading

Steven Chabot — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 15:10:16 +0000

I’ll tell you one thing about not having a computer:

I kinda don’t miss reading my feeds. Sure, I am interested in what everyone has to say–the small blogs for their individual life stories, and the large blogs for the cool things I am shown which I might have not discovered otherwise. But today, as I got up before work and drank coffee, I skipped my usual routine of the Gmail -> Globe and Mail - > Google Reader - > Slashdot -> Arts and Letters Daily.

What I did instead is get up at 6:45 and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the morning sun. Sure, the book is not all that ground breaking, and it is most surely a book for hippies, but I will finished it in a day and I am enjoying it all the same. So I read for a few minutes, shuffled off to get coffee down the street, shuffled back and sat in my chair while the cat moved throughout the room to sleep, following the spots the sun made on the floor as it rose.

And while I was reading I was thinking, something I don’t think I do as well when reading on the Internet. I was thinking quite a few things, but when I finished to go to work I thought this: my morning was more enjoyable then it had been in a long time. I didn’t really miss anything by not getting the news from its various sources both traditional and from the blogsphere. I put off reading my feeds until I got to work, and I was fine with that.

But not only was I fine with it, but when I did get to work I was less interested in what they had to say. Just looking over the titles, the posts seemed meritless, often recycled, and despite objections from the community, more dead to me then the oldest books I have on my shelf; Pirsig in his book mentions the Tao-Te-Ching, and I almost put down his book to pick up my own copy just from the force of its life there on the shelf.

So why is it, despite all the potential for debate and interaction and giving works “life” that dead, cold, fixed traditional books lack, do I find blogs so lifeless? Why do they inspire less re-reading, debate, or commentary then a great origial piece of formal writing? Why do they seem so recycled and derivative? How come I have no desire to go back to a great post, even the best of blog posts, but yet Eastern monks and Western hippies still re-read the Tao-Te-Ching two or three thousand years later? And how come if the devil held the entirety of the blogsphere in the past and the future in his left hand, and all of the copies of Plato’s Complete Works in his right, I would gladly toss blogs out the window?

Perhaps I am aristocratic, a label I will accept if it can be proven to be true. But I don’t feel like I am, at least in the sense where I think I am better, or others cannot see what I see. Maybe I am too anachronistic, too wedded to the old media. At the same time I grew up with computers, feel comfortable with them and have had a web presence of some sort or another for over 10 years. I see how the media is changing things, and I see its potential, but things get fuzzy when I read the actual sentences word-for-word. Or, another way, I see the justification for all the buzz about the way things are progressing, but in the end, I think that we are making too much of “the medium is the message” — I cannot be all the message, because when I get down to it, I find the focus on the medium is somehow masking the lack of message.

Perhaps I see these posts in the wrong way: they are not extended treatments of a topic, or even essays, but sentences in a debate that is happening in a way that is closer to real time then printed works could ever aspire to. Then why do I find the debate pedantic, superficial (in terms of topic as well as in terms of depth on serious topics), and uninspired?

And, because you cannot question a media in the media without irony, why I am writing this here? Does it betray the fact that I actually do endorse blogs, or is it because I have no other voice right now? Any answers?

Wikis for research on public display

Steven Chabot — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 19:47:20 +0000

I heard through the grapevine of a blogger’s announcement that she will be conducting her research through a wiki.

I’ve been wanting to do the same thing for a while, but having some hosting space gives me the flexibility of installing my own software. I was looking at some, Mediawiki which runs Wikipedia for instance, but I don’t know if there is something that I particularly want.

What I would like is something that allows me to write or take notes, but then also allows discussion right within the page, not as in Wikipedia where the discussion is held in a separate page. This would give me the ability to have people annotate what I was writing as I was writing it.

I think the best I will be able to do is just have a section at the bottom of each page where I want comments labeled “Comments”, and make it clear that is where I want people to write. It would be good as well to have a mechanism for there to be citation links to my work as well.

It would be a lot neater if I could have come kind of two columned thing, with the writing on one side and the comments on the other (like the layout of GAM3R 7H30RY). Any ideas?

Carnival of the InfoSciences #48

Steven Chabot — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:17:21 +0000

Everyone, the Carnival of the InfoSciences #48 is up now at Connecting Librarian.

I feel as I actually get into my studies I can move more fully into the whole library blogsphere, without just lurking and reading along. Anyway, beyond one of my own posts that is there, you also read about the immensely fascinating science behind deciphering the Archimedes Palimpsest over at Living the Scientific Life.

On the Essay

Steven Chabot — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:26:38 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about the essay today as I walked around Toronto, eating a small cone of ice cream from the truck, watching all the business people scurry around.

I was thinking about writing an essay about the essay, and on what no one really writes them much anymore. About why essays are not books, nor even articles, but how the best of writers incorporate aspects of essay writing in their books and articles. About how the essay has nothing at all to do with text length–although bloggers tend to erroneously think of themselves as essayists–and everything to do with exploration, experimentation and the strolling way they go around a topic without really getting to the heart of anything.

This is the real reason I think nobody cares about the essay: they not only want it short, but they also want it to the point. The essay may get to the point, it may not. A good essay is in the travel, not the destination.

And, so this morning I get this in my list of feeds: Death of the Essay? :

So now I’m wondering, Are we Ñ both in journalism and in the publishing world Ñ too fixated on the idea of a narrative thrust? Are we afraid of the rambling nature of the essay? Taking its name from the French word essai, meaning “attempt,” an essay doesn’t set out to tell a complete, narrative story, but rather simply tosses out an idea like a trial balloon. Are we too polarized these days to welcome such an art form that doesn’t bother with neat, tied-up-with-a-bow conclusions?

Exactly. Except one quibble: Montaigne was less “attempting” to toss out ideas which were interesting, but submitting himself to a “trial”, trying to find out what he believed, which of his thoughts he held true and which of them were just inherited from society.